


Missing People

by MyEvilTwin (ProtoNeoRomantic)



Series: Blood Screaming [7]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Serenity (2005)
Genre: A certain God who shall remain nameless, Angst, Appearances, Bad Parenting, Be Careful What You Wish For, Blue Sun, Changing Tenses, Crossover, Earth That Was, Episode: s01e11 Trash, Episode: s02e19 I Only Have Eyes For You, Episode: s03e09 The Wish, Expectations, F/F, F/M, Fakeing Orgasms, Faking Emotions, Faking Social Interactions, Family Drama, Family Secrets, Father-Daughter Relationship, Father-Son Relationship, Fatherhood, Gen, Goddesses, Horror, I swear I haven't forgotten this, Inside the Box, Irony, Jealous Wash, M/M, Magic Made Them Do It, Magical Accidents, Magical Girls, Manipulation, Martial Law - Freeform, Miracles, Missing Persons, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Motherhood, Murder-Suicide, Mutual Non-Con, Oh! THAT 'Goddess Hecate'?, Orgasm Control, Orgasm Delay, Other, Outer Space, Outside the box, Past Tense, Poltergeists, Pregnancy, Present Tense, Priorities, Psychic Abilities, Psychic River, Psychotic River, Rape/Non-con Elements, Religion, Responsibility, Same Song; Different Verse, Sequels "The Presumption" and "A Stitch In Time" anticipated in 2018 and 2019, Shifting perspectives, Social Roles, Sorry for the lag, Space Pirates, Spaceships, Sport Flirting, Statutory Rape, Stuck in time, Teen Pregnancy, The City Dump, The Eternal Council, Time Going All Wonky, Time Travel, Truth Spells, Unplanned Pregnancy, Virgin Sacrifice, Werewolves, Werewolves in Space, What-If, Witchcraft, World Without Men, authenticity, bloodlines, schrodinger's cat - Freeform, sexual warfare, some Canon Dialogue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-02
Updated: 2014-10-12
Packaged: 2018-01-19 04:45:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 9
Words: 47,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1455889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProtoNeoRomantic/pseuds/MyEvilTwin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A lot of people in Sunnydale are dealing with specific person shaped holes in their lives.  Some of them, maybe not so much dealing.  Some of them maybe not so much lives.  ...After a while, maybe not all that specific either. And then, hey, "Toto, I don't think we're in Sunnydale anymore!"</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Desperate Times

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Lady's Choice](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1223416) by [ProtoNeoRomantic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProtoNeoRomantic/pseuds/ProtoNeoRomantic). 
  * Inspired by [Who Do You Think You Are?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1235281) by [ProtoNeoRomantic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProtoNeoRomantic/pseuds/ProtoNeoRomantic). 



> The Firefly parts start in Chapter 6.
> 
> For more information on Canon Compliance/Divergence and Story Mechanics and Themes, see series description.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hank, Giles, Buffy and Snyder are all feeling trapped and confused by there responsibilities, by ghostly goings on and by the consequences of their recent sexual adventures. Owen Thurman once again confronts his feelings for Buffy.

Hank meant to get home by 7:00. He really did. But only working three days a week, no matter how careful Janet was with his schedule, there was always one last thing to squeeze in. Okay, technically, in this particular instance, that one last thing had been his penis, which he had needed to squeeze into Janet’s cunt, but it was a special circumstance. Normally, Janet had a strict policy against doing it at the office, but with everything that was going wrong in his life, she wanted to show her support. And to prove that he was still hers. Given how much he was relying on her, Hank didn’t need the hassle involved in making a point of the fact that he wasn’t. Besides, his life was stressful and he needed sex. And Mitzie was out with bronchitis. And he was not about to have either of them set foot in Joyce’s house.

Of course, the squeezing in had not ended with the sex. There were still and always actual work things that had to be squared away for the marathon day he needed to have to morrow to get ready for his four day weekend. By the time Hank actually got home it was 8:15. He was sure Buffy would be pissed, or gone. He hadn’t dared to call her and tell her when he was leaving, figuring she would just take it as permission to break curfew for two and a half-hours. Or maybe to have Angel over to the house. Or Mr. Giles. Hank didn’t believe for a minute that she had only been fucking herself last night. She had had a partner. Live and in person and in his—no, in Joyce's—house. The only question left in his mind was which son-of-a-bitch it was. Well, that and what he was about to walk in on now.

Buffy had dinner on the table waiting for him, still hot, thanks to the magic of the crock pot. And the fact that she had lived with him enough years to know what ‘I’ll definitely be home no later than seven’ really meant. She’d even made a gallon of iced tea and set the table complete with placemats and napkin rings. She was sitting there in the dining room, wearing a nice, conservative outfit, drumming her fingers nervously on the table cloth like a person with a lot of energy to burn. Or something important to say.

“Damn,” Hank said, surprised at how upset he was by news he’d thought he had already known, “you are pregnant aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” Buffy admitted nervously. “And I’m having it, so there is no point even arguing about it.” Hank sat down, served himself and started eating in silence, steaming. Buffy stared at her plate and pushed the food around a little with her fork, waiting for him to blow.

“You’re sure it’s his?” Hank asked after a long while. Grief struggled with anger in his voice. Buffy couldn’t meet his eyes. She tried to nod, but it was such a shitty thing to say. Especially if she was going to someday eventually admit that it really was Giles’ baby. Which if they were going to stay together and be a family, how could she not? But as of this moment, it was still an accusation that could send him to prison. Or out of the country. Or worse, apparently, if the creepy Council found out about it. Nothing at all had been worked out about that Buffy suddenly realized. Had Giles even said that they were going to stay a couple and keep the baby together or had she only assumed it?

“Pretty sure,” Buffy mumbled, still looking down at her plate, leaving herself the out that she could have miscalculated rather than having manipulated him with a cruel and deliberate lie.

“Goddammit!” Hank shouted, slamming her fist on the table, “Don’t play games with me, little girl! Who else have you been _fucking_!”

“Nobody!” Buffy shouted back, succumbing to tears. But she knew that he knew that she was lying. Hank was deeply angry and ashamed of his daughter. He wished desperately that Joyce was here right now to somehow fix this, or at least be jointly _responsible_ for the fact that it couldn't _be_ fixed.

And yet, somewhere in the midst of that, Hank found a little space to be relieved. Buffy was clearly _not_ a hundred percent sure that her mother’s killer had fathered her baby, and even if that was wishful thinking on her part, at least it gave Hank a pretty good idea who he had actually scared out of her bedroom the previous night. It was a pretty sorry state of affairs when a man could be _relieved_ that a forty-something teacher was sneaking into his teenage daughter’s bedroom window in the middle of the night to fuck her, but he was. And suddenly, to his even greater relief, and maybe just a little sneaking sense of triumph, he had a pretty good idea what he was going to do about it.

****

Giles walked into the library and turned on the lights. It was the same as it had ever been. Occult books filled the shelves. Weapons rested unseen in their cabinets. His private office waited, jammed with its neatly organized clutter of items significant only to him. But it was different. It didn’t feel like his private domain anymore, his place of refuge, his stronghold in the fight against evil. It felt vulnerable, exposed, very much like a public school library. A ridiculous place to carry on a clandestine war. Or a secret affair. He stared a long while at the seamlessly repaired floor, at the place where the Earthquake had cracked it nine months ago. The mouth of Hell waited there, beneath his feet, as it always had. But tonight it felt more alive somehow. Watchful. He felt very much like a middle-aged librarian, quite as horrified by his circumstances as one might imagine such a presumably milquetoast person to be.

It wasn’t only that he feared the practical consequences of being caught in a relationship that transgressed the laws and mores of both societies in which he simultaneously lived his life, though that was no frivolous matter in itself. It was more that he had no trouble seeing the point of view from which those laws and mores could be judged to be correct. As for example, the point of view of anyone who thought it might be _wrong_ to use a position of authority to gain sexual access to a girl whose _mother_ was too young to go out with you. It had been a very long time since he’d thought of himself as the kind of man that parents couldn’t trust around their daughters, and almost as long since he’d thought of himself as someone the Council couldn’t trust carry out its most basic edicts. Unlike in his youth, he was not proud of either distinction.

Buffy would be furious of course at the suggestion that he was taking advantage of her. It implied that he had her at a disadvantage. The only trouble was that it was true. Granted, Buffy was different from other high school girls. She was exceptional. She was dedicated. She was self-directed. She was a brave, strong, resourceful, responsible, _formidable_ young woman who would someday be far more than a match for him. She was also a volcano of sexual energy in desperate need of an outlet, and she walked in a world that no mere boy could safely inhabit. Indeed, she was in every possible way oh so very mature for her age. Which was still only seventeen years old.

He had loved and fucked and killed and lied and had his helpful hand in saving the world and keeping it a mess long before she had walked or crawled or cried or breathed or swam into the universe as a hopeful and deceptively simple little cell. Even if a Slayer was by definition a woman and an Englishman a minor until he turned twenty-one and told his father to get stuffed, he still had thirteen times the experience of adult human life that she had. He understood things about her and about himself and about men and women and humans in general that she could not yet begin to imagine, things that cannot be learned without being lived. To pretend otherwise was a dangerous and unforgivable self-deception.

Yes, he was taking advantage. Buffy depended on him, and not just in the ways that all lovers do. He was her main source of guidance as to who and what she was, not only as the Slayer, but as an aspiring adult human person. She came to him with the problems and concerns she withheld from her own parents, including information about her romantic and sexual life that no man outside her family had any right to know. He was trusted with these confidences at least in part because the Council had placed him in a position of authority over her. More importantly, though she’d never admit it, she _accepted_ his authority over her as the price of his guidance and protection.

‘Protection’, Rupert laughed bitterly to himself. He knew what ‘protection’ Watchers really offered Slayers, and at what price. But Buffy didn’t, not yet. As Celeste had put it, shortly before her own death, ‘the shepherd may be fond of the sheep, but he makes his money at the slaughter house.’ Buffy may have thought she was choosing her own destiny in pursuing this relationship; but Rupert knew full well that if she had had any idea what the man she had invited into her heart, into her _body_ , planned to put her through in ten short months, she would have chosen differently. Rupert was not Buffy’s equal. He was her elder and in many ways, her inferior. He was not her partner but her handler, a shepherd in the pay of butchers. The fact that he was in love with her didn’t change any of that, it just made it all an even more thoroughly tangled mess.

To make matters still worse, now that her mother was gone and her relationship with her father remained as strained and unhealthy as it so very clearly was, he could feel her leaning into him, desperate to depend on him even more. And why shouldn't she. Besides being the closest thing to a trusted parental figure in her own increasingly confusing life, he was also the father of her unborn child. She had a _right_ to depend upon him. He was not at all sure; however, that that gave him a corresponding right to take up the reciprocal role, to demand what fathers to be (what _husbands_ ) typically demanded of the mothers to be who were their wives.

She had not asked of him and he had not made any such commitment to her. In the eyes of the Council, he must not. By the laws of the State of California, he could not. And both of those revered and formidable consolations of human beings, each in its own right holding the power of life and death over both he and Buffy, were still blissfully, ignorantly, innocently, _trustingly_ supporting and rewarding him for his work as an educator and quasi-parental guardian over her. By the very concrete and morally/legally binding means of a monthly direct deposit. Which made him feel, on top of everything else, as though he were once again a practicing thief.

Tearing his eyes away from the floor, leaving the Gordian knot unsolved, Giles walked to his office intending to make a start of some of the work that had piled up while he was gone. In the middle of his desk was a large cardboard box. Scrawled across it in black magic marker was the legend, ‘J.C.’s stuff.’ The box was full of personal things; books, a sweater, a day planner, one corkscrew-like ‘earring’; which had obviously been left in her classroom.

There were a handful of not-so-floppy disks as well, which Giles realized, for Jenny, could very easily be personal things. It struck him again how little they had walked in each other’s worlds. He had called it a betrayal that she kept her origins from him and counted himself honest for sharing the secrets that he was a Watcher, Buffy the Slayer. But he had shared so little of what it _meant_ to be a Watcher. He thought again of the days he had wasted being angry with her, feeling wounded and superior because she had kept her own counsel, made her own judgments about whom to trust and what to reveal, just as he had.

Suddenly, Giles felt... not a _presence_ exactly, nor an absence, as he had felt in the cemetery, but a sort of calling _to_ a presence, a longing that promised to be fulfilled. As if obeying a command, he reached into the box and pulled out a yellow 3½ inch disk. It felt heavy in his hand. Powerful. Dangerous. The disk bore a hand-printed label: RESTORATION.

With a little cry of surprise, Giles dropped the disk back into the box. Whatever it was that had reached out to him was gone. That label couldn’t mean what he had momentarily thought it meant.  Surely he had heard Willow or Oz or someone use that same term in a computer related context.  It was something for fixing system crashes or what have you. That was all it was. He was sure of it.

His hands still shaking, Giles reached into the box again, this time seizing upon something familiar and comforting. It was a large rose quartz suspended from a leather strap. He had given it to Jenny after the incident with Eyghon, correctly guessing that she would know of its healing powers. The gift had been well received, if not the giver. She had told him during their next reconciliation that she’d worn it next to her heart in the intervening weeks, that it had helped to bring her to a decision to come back to him.

Tying the strap around his neck, Rupert let the large crystal drop beneath his shirt, where his tie helped to conceal it. He still didn’t feel Jenny’s presence, but he felt comforted a little. Of course, he realized, if Jenny had been present, even in spirit, she couldn’t have been very happy with him. Her blood had not been cold when he’d betrayed her, and with the one person he had always put above her when she was alive, with Buffy.

****

Buffy didn’t have to worry about waking up to patrol. She couldn’t have possibly slept. She lay in the dark like a cat, ears pricked up to listen for the sounds and silences that would tell her her dad had finally gone to sleep. Hank hadn’t said a lot about her pregnancy except that she ought to ‘think some more’ about her decision. Buffy had said she would just to get him off her ass. There was no sense fighting about it. It wasn’t like she had a lot of strong logical arguments to make. She couldn’t even really say she’d wrapped her mind around what was about to happen. She was firm in her resolve, and she could just about picture holding her tiny, precious baby in her arms; but when it came to details, like where the kid would be while she was at school, or the Bronze, or the cemetery or the Hellmouth, the picture got a pretty sketchy. Would they live with her _dad_? With Giles? Would it ever be safe to admit he was the father? If not, how were they going to live around that? She didn’t know. It was a lot to not know.

At Midnight, when she hadn’t heard any wakeful noises in the house for almost an hour, Buffy got up and got dressed, not in the slacks and sweater she’d worn for her dad, but a tight little blue number too short to meet the tops of her thigh high boots. She felt a desperate longing, a need, not exactly for sex although she did want that, and specifically to finish it too. But what she wanted more that anything was belonging, acceptance, clarification of her status. She wanted it the way a seventh grade girl wants the one really important party invitation that lets her know that all the other cheerleaders agree that she really is a cheerleader too and not just a girl that some “fair-minded” adult insisted on letting wear the uniform. She wanted Giles to tell her she was his girlfriend.

She went braless and thought about skipping panties too. After all, when a guy couldn't make up his mind in this short life, there was really nothing left for a girl to do but to make it up for him and with Giles... that girl had better be pretty persuasive. But she couldn’t quite justify climbing in and out of her widow with her bare bush hanging out, even if half the town had already seen it. Instead, she found some lacy black panties that her father didn’t know about, climbed down that old, familiar tree as nimbly as a cat in search of an unwary midnight snack, and went looking for Giles.

When she found the side door into the main corridor of Sunnydale High unlocked, Buffy smiled. It was never locked until Giles locked it, when he closed the library, usually late at night, and often without going home himself. She’d known Giles couldn’t stay away from the library for a whole 24 hours that he wasn’t actually hospitalized, even if it did mean walking in Sunnydale at night.

Snyder groused a little about Giles’ late nights on security grounds, but since he never did anything about it, Buffy figured he was secretly thrilled to have someone under him who would work double hours for free. She suspected he’d be less thrilled to know who his supposed-to-be-subordinate was actually working all those hours for. Of course, Buffy grinned, he wouldn’t be exactly thrilled about some of the other things that were about to be going on in that library either. Buffy’s skin was singing with anticipation of Giles’ touch, her minds ear already hearing the pledge of love and coupleyness that he would have no choice but to make her, when she rounded the corner by the trophy case... and was not alone.

“I’m not afraid to use it, I swear!” a boy shouted at a girl he was holding at gunpoint.

“Oh my God!” the girl sobbed, running towards Buffy. Buffy passed her, laying on speed, fractions of seconds separating her from the gunman.

“Don’t walk away from me, bitch!” he screamed, the instant before Buffy kicked the gun from his hand. Her skirt road up so high, she could feel it bunching around her waist. She was extremely happy with her choice to wear panties after all.

As a janitor came running up to check on the girl, the boy gasped, “What happened?” He seemed as terrified as anyone. Which Buffy found somehow unsettling, bordering on infuriating.

“That’s what I’d like to know!” she demanded, clinging defensively to her anger, as if he were trying to take it from her unjustly.

“Thank you,” he burbled, taking both her hands, “Thank you! If you hadn’t been here...” He looked at his girlfriend miserably. She ran to him and fell into his arms, both of them sobbing. “My god,” he wailed, “I can’t believe I almost—! I don’t even _own_ a gun.”

“I don’t see any gun,” the janitor said, as if they all might have imagined it.

“Thank you,” said the girl earnestly, turning towards Buffy, but still holding tight to her would be murderer. “You saved us.”

“I saved _you_ ,” Buffy corrected hotly, “from this creepazoid who was about to kill you!”

“No,” the girl tried to explain, “It… wasn’t like that.”

“I didn’t see any gun,” the janitor repeated.

“But I—!” Buffy started to argue, still angry and confused.

“Do you _want_ to talk to the police,” the girl asked, gently reminding Buffy that the whole damn town knew all about her business, or thought they did.

“You know what?” she said, frustrated, clamping down on both her temper and her tongue, “forget about it. You want to get yourself killed, fine. I was never here.” What could she do? She took the quick cemeteries and allies tour of fabulous Sunnydale, California, lashing out at trees and shadows in the absence of real enemies even more than was usual, then went home to catch a few hours in the sack. There would be plenty of time for love or war or whatever this was tomorrow, she tried to reassure herself. One thing about Giles, she might not always understand where he was coming from or what direction he was going to take, but she always knew where to find him.

****

Giles awoke to the sound of footsteps entering the library. The morning sun found his face pillowed on the cleavage of an open book on a table strewn with texts of a similar subject matter. “Oh. Hello, Owen,” he yawned, glad to see the friendly, familiar face, one of his few regulars.

“Hey, Mr. Giles,” Owen said, grinning shyly, the way he did before any conversation that might last longer than thirty seconds. “I’m really glad you’re back.” Then a look of concern passed over his face. “Are you alright, though?” he asked.

“Oh, erm... yes,” Giles lied, “I was just...”

Owen examined one of the books. “Pondering weak and weary over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore?” he asked with a sort of sardonic sympathy.

Giles sighed. “Precisely,” he admitted, not really expecting the boy to understand. Owen looked entirely too intrigued. He knew nothing about Mr. Giles’ mystical background, but he _thought_ he knew what had happened to Jenny Calendar. “Did you...erm... want something?” Giles asked uncomfortably.

“Oh, yeah,” said Owen, seeming to come to himself, turning suddenly grim. “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course,” Giles said. “Sit down.” He could count on one hand the number of times a student, other than those who knew him as Buffy’s Watcher, had come to him for advice. He felt relieved to be able to serve as an honest, helpful faculty member for once, if only for a few moments. He supposed it went a little ways towards justifying that portion of his finances which was supported the the property taxes of each and every one of his neighbors.

“Are women really turned on by intellectual men?” the boy asked earnestly, “I mean, not in high school, obviously, but in real life?”

Giles sighed, He wasn’t sure this was really the type of wisdom he ought to be imparting. “Well... it depends on the woman really,” he assayed at any rate.

Owen sighed too. “So that means no, basically?”

Giles gave a small shrug, “I wouldn’t say that. Intellectual men are attractive to intelligent women, and I would say vice versa.”

“The thing is,” Owen went on, “There’s only one girl I want. I feel like I’m going to die if I can’t have her! But—I mean I guess she’s smart and everything, but she’s... kind of wild? Which is what makes her so hot, she’s... a force of nature! She’s like… a volcano! I can't sleep at night thinking what it would be like to be... one with... a woman like that! I think I would be literally willing to die afterward if just once... just for a few minutes.... But she thinks I’m boring. She hasn’t said ten words to me since our one and only date last year.” 

Giles sighed more deeply still. God must really hate him for something. Murder, sodomy, criminal seduction and fornication with demons, for example? “I’m not really sure I’m the right person to ask about this,” he warned stiffly.

“And she does read,” Owen went on, exactly as if he had met with some encouragement. “She’s about the only person who comes in here more than I do. But she also _does_ stuff.”

“Buffy,” said Giles, since it was painfully clear of whom Owen spoke, “is... Buffy. I don’t think advice about women in general would translate to Buffy, or vice versa.”

“Maybe I should try asking her out again,” Owen mused.

It had to be the murders, Giles decided. No depth of sexual depravity could warrant this kind of torture. “I don’t... really feel... comfortable with this conversation,” he said aloud.

“Okay, sorry,” Owen mumbled, stung. “I’ll just… get some poetry books or something.”

“Listen,” said Giles, taking pity on the boy, “You’ll... hit your stride eventually. If Buffy never… responds to you, someone else will, and you’ll be just as glad.”

“Do you _really_ think that?” Owen asked skeptically.

“So all experience suggests.” Giles assured him with a small, benign smile.

“So what should I do in the meantime?” Owen asked.

“Well... I’ve always found William Blake to be good for a little... philosophical perspective,” Giles suggested.

“‘Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desire!’” Owen recited brightly, with entirely too much conviction. “Thanks!” he declared, “You’ve been a really big help!”

“I... erm... hope so,” Giles murmured dubiously, as Owen leapt up and headed for the door without any poetry books at all. He was left with the uneasy feeling that a very bad situation was about to be made oddly worse.

**** 

“ _What do you mean, let you go?” Angel demanded, “Where are you going?”_

“ _Home, to Ohio,” Drusilla answered sadly._

“ _Then why do you need a gun?!” Angel demanded._

_“Don’t worry,” Drusilla assured him, “I was too much of a coward to use it. Don’t worry about... what happens to me. You...deserve better.”_

“ _No,” said Angel, putting the gun to his own temple, “I killed you!” slowly applying pressure to the trigger. “I don’t deserve anything!”_

The shot roused Buffy with a scream on her lips. Unless it was the alarm clock, loudly announcing the advent of seven a.m. She slammed her hand down on the clock hard and fast, knowing that it would be broken, not giving a damn. The house was empty and silent. Buffy missed her mom. She was also exhausted. But there was nothing for her to do but go to school. She couldn’t just sit in that empty house all day. Besides, she needed to see Giles. She needed to be reassured that he was still hers, that whatever kind of trouble they were in, they were in it together. She just had to keep telling herself that however ambiguous their status had seemed in the lonely dead of night, he had actually made it pretty clear at his apartment yesterday (by actions if not by words, exactly) that he was going to be with her. Even if he had been less than enthused about the idea of her having his baby.

****

“What do you mean he’s not here?” Snyder demanded.

“Just what I said,” Ms. Barton replied, “Coach Marin isn’t here. He didn’t show up for bus duty, and he didn’t call in. First period starts in twenty minutes. I have to find someone to cover a ninth grade gym class, and I can’t do it because I have to cover Computer Science.”

“Did you try the pool complex?” Snyder pressed. “You know how obsessed he is with the swim team.”

“I’ve looked everywhere,” she insisted. “I even tried Ruth’s office. He’s always ‘consulting’ with her first thing in the morning.”

“Well, has she seen him?” Snyder snapped.

Ms. Barton shrugged. “She wasn’t there. The place was locked up.” She paused for a moment, then looked pleasantly scandalized. “You don’t suppose they finally ran away together?” she suggested, a twinkle in her eye.

For a moment Snyder involuntarily imagined the fat nurse and the bullet headed coach writhing against one another, gasping in more-than-typically-breathless ecstasy. It made him think, with a sickening shiver, of the sex he had had yesterday with Harmony Kendall. It seemed equally wrong, equally disgusting. But it wasn't. It was however, at least as unlikely in his opinion. “I’d be shocked,” said sourly, trying to banish both imagination and memory. “No... something strange is going on here.”

Ms. Barton sighed. “Isn’t that our school motto?” she asked.

Snyder favored her with a withering look. “You cover the computer lab,” he told her. “Coach Hawkins can cover more than one gym class at a time. They can play dodgeball. I have things to do. I’m still the principal around here, damnit!  Whatever is going on here, nothing changes that!  This is my school!  Mine!  And I say what does and does not happen here!”  

But even as he said so, his senses were filled with the loathsome yet unsettlingly arousing memory of orgasaming inside the hateful, beautiful, underaged, overused, belatedly resisting but alway unconsenting Harmony Kendall, and his soul was sick with regret and terror.  And with a much less definable but altogether horrible feeling of powerlessness to make something so awful not have happen to him, which he couldn't help believing was very much how it must feel to have been raped.   


	2. Desperate Measures

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As ghosts, gunplay and vampire invasions persist at Sunnydale High, can Snyder regain control? When Buffy and Willow must fight a poltergeist on their own while Giles tries to contact Jenny Calendar, will it be Amy Madison to the rescue? Meanwhile, Cordelia contemplates revenge, Owen asks Buffy to the Sadie Hawkins Dance and Hank makes Giles an offer he can't refuse.

Buffy was dressed and at school in record time. They still had nearly twenty minutes until the first bell. In her mind, she was already walking into the library, already being reassuringly, supportively caressed by Giles, being cossetted in his arms. But she never made it that far. Just inside the front door, Owen Thurman lumbered into her path and stood there smiling shyly, ignoring her obvious desire for him to be anywhere else. “Excuse me,” she said, stepping around him, and fairly sprinting down the hallway, wondering for the millionth time how such a smart, good-looking guy could be a complete oaf. Long-legged Owen loped alongside her at a leisurely pace.

“I’ll walk with you,” he offered, doing exactly that.

“Suit yourself,” said Buffy dryly. And he did.

“So...” he said when they were close enough to the library for Buffy taste the hope of escape it offered, “Are you planning to go to that dance tomorrow night?” He stopped and stood with his back to the library door, blocking her way like the oblivious, riddle spouting guardian of some enchanted passageway.

“The one where the _girls_ ask the _boys_?” she reminded him pointedly.

“That’s the one,” he acknowledged, oafishly embarrassed, “And if you're... I mean you know, if you want to,” he finished hesitantly but hopefully, grinning in that maddening, aw shucks way, “I thought you might ask me?”

“Can’t,” Buffy answered immediately, with maybe just a little more bite than the situation called for. “I'm busy tomorrow night. I have to walk down town at two a.m. and picked a fight in a bar(!)” God, had she once actually thought of this... _boy_ as alluringly broody and mysterious? What did it take to get rid of someone who couldn’t take eleven months of pointed silence as a hint? Of course, she guessed she could always confess that she was carrying Giles’ love child. Then again, there was no telling what, in Owen’s mind, might qualify as a turn on. Maybe the thought of following his lexicographic idol where some but not many had gone before would make him hard as a rock. Or maybe he would see dating a pregnant girl as a grand adventure in being a devil-may-conform, risk-taking rebel without a cause.

“Well... Okay,” Owen said, heading off down the hallway, confused and dejected, “I guess I’ll... see you around.”

“Yes,” said Buffy, “I’m sure you will.”

“Hello,” said Giles in a tired, oddly sad way, looking up from one of his books as Buffy entered the library.

“Hey,” she replied, smiling nervously. Sneaking a quick look around, she leaned down and tried to kiss him on the lips. He turned his head away, fussing with some papers. “Hey,” she repeated, unpleasantly puzzled, “what gives?”

“This... isn’t the place,” said Giles tensely.

“Well I wasn’t going to _do_ anything... much,” Buffy pouted. Although she might very well have if he'd given her half a chance.

Giles gave her a stern look, which shouldn’t have been sexy, but was. “Very grave things are happening here,” he said seriously.

“Well that’s unusual,” Buffy quipped, but Giles was far from laughing. He told her in extremely vague terms about a ‘presence’ he had felt in the library last night, and in extremely precise terms about _both_ incidents that had occurred with Harmony Kendall the day before. Before she could interject, he also acknowledged the parallels between the second incident and the scene she had witnessed the night before. “The janitor told me, about all of it,” he explained. “And of course, there is the involvement of the language used in your dreams, and of course… what you yourself experienced in English class yesterday.”

Buffy looked miserably guilty. She felt it too. But she quickly traded her guilt for confusion when Giles said, “I’m afraid it’s terribly obvious what’s happening here. It’s Jenny. She’s… trapped here. Because of us. Because of... what we've done. And she’s not going anywhere until she’s found a way to have it out with me.”

*** 

Snyder knelt diffidently on the mildew stained tile, peering down into the opening. They were coming up through the foundation! They couldn’t do this, damn it. It was out of bounds! There were supposed to be agreements in place. There were supposed to be rules! The raid on Parent Teacher Night had been violation enough, but this had all the earmarks of a permanent grab for territory. “There are too Goddamn many tunnels in this town,” he murmured to himself. He felt guilt for speaking such sedition against Sunnydale, but things were beyond out of hand!

Snyder rose, and by the time he reached his feet, he’d reached a decision. “I want a school wide announcement,” he told Mrs. Haulk as soon as he got back to the office. “Until further notice, this campus closes at four p.m. Everything locked up. Any student, teacher or employee caught on campus after hours will be harshly disciplined. Any practices, games, meets, tryouts or club activities of any kind that can’t be moved up or held off campus will be canceled, is that clear?”

The secretary nodded. “What about the dance on Friday?” she asked. “Should we cancel that too?”

“No!” Snyder snapped. “The dance is off campus, has been for years.” This was about one thing and one thing only, he decided. Vampires. As for... the other problem, he would ride it out. He was still the principal of this school and by God he would set it's schedule! In doing so, he would not be forced to accommodate the inappropriate behavior of students or faculty, dead or alive.

**** 

“What a load of horse hooey!” Willow exclaimed.

“No shit,” Buffy agreed miserably. “The gun, the Sadie Hawkins Dance, it’s all a pattern that doesn’t fit with the way Miss Calendar died. But there’s never going to be any convincing him of that. There’s too much that _does_ fit. Especially when you really, really want it to. Like the whole… student/teacher… sex thing—God! Poor Harmony!—and, I mean, it’s not like he’s _wrong_ exactly about what we did or how she would have felt about it. It just… doesn’t happen to be what’s actually going on.”

“Agreed,” Willow acknowledged. “But he probably is right about it being a ghost though, a poltergeist. Which means, he’s probably also right—or half right anyway—about what to do about it. We have to find out who’s ghost it really is and help them work through whatever it is that they’re so pissed off about.” Buffy started to respond with a slightly snarky comment about having enough of her own problems to solve without becoming a therapist for ghosts, but when she opened her mouth something ranker than sarcasm threatened to come out. She ran for the girls’ room, Willow following close behind. The world was spinning. She felt too unsteady leaning over the toilet. She sat down on the floor with her back against the stall door....

_Grace knelt on the bathroom floor, retching, weeping. This couldn’t be happening. But it was. She cursed the day she’d ever come to Sunnydale. She cursed the day she’d ever fallen in love. Love(!) At seventeen that might have been an excuse, but she was thirty-two, and there was no excuse for it. She had chosen to have sex with a high school student. And she had gotten caught. The hard way. What was she going to do? She wished she had two one-way tickets to a country where poets were the acknowledged ‘legislators of mankind.’ She wished she had whatever quality allowed a person to go down to Mexico, have a surgeon carve away her sins, and come back wholehearted and free to love again. She wished the Earth would open its jaws and swallow her whole, that she could end the agony of scrabbling at her fate in desperate hope of salvation and finally be damned once and for all._

 ****

“Mr. Giles?” the voice was warm, polite, friendly even, so it was with no small shock that Giles found himself looking up into the face of Hank 'I have a gun and I'm coming to kill you' Summers. Giles stammered and stumbled over his tongue as he took several tries to coordinate standing up, putting his book down, marking his place, and extending his hand. Hank accepted and shook it with a small smile that, with no real reason that he could put his finger on, Giles found decidedly unsettling.

“I think I'll have a seat, if you don't mind,” Hank invited himself, amused at the librarian's distress.

“Erm, yes, please,” he managed, still off balance.

“I wanted to apologize, for the other day,” Hank offered with a warm, easy smile, enjoying the fact that this left his companion even more confused, but unable to say so.

“Well I... I suppose everyone's emotions were running a little... a little high,” the Englishman finally managed. Hank felt his assessment of the situation ever more corroborated. An innocent man wouldn't have been so quick to accept such a tepid apology for exposing him to such a dangerous accusation.

“I realized something,” Hank went on, “about the other day. Buffy, comes to you for advise, for guidance. You're the one she wanted to tell that she was pregnant before anyone else. She trusts you. And she's a pretty smart girl. She must have pretty good reasons.

“I have business to get back to, back in L.A. But Buffy has to live here, with a parent or legal guardian. I know it's a lot to ask, but well, you're here anyway, and...” Hank produced a sheaf of legal looking papers from a slim leather portfolio. “So I had Hal draw up these Temporary Guardianship papers this morning. Apparently, he's pretty well acquainted with all the local judges. He thinks we might be able to get it approved this afternoon.”

“Good lord! Are you serious?” Giles gasped, clearly distressed.

Hank gave him a hard look, his eyes narrowed and his smile twisted with grim, cruel amusement. “Are you going to tell me some reason why I shouldn't be?” he asked coolly, “some conflict of interests you might have that I should know about? Some reason I shouldn't trust her with you?”

Giles' eyes widened in surprise and mild horror as he caught up to the game that was being played. But Hank wasn't finished. “See in the old days,” he said, “when one man messed with another man's daughter, there were only a few things he might do. He might cut off his balls, he might kill him, or he might make him marry her. Well... this is the twentieth century. People don't act like that anymore. They mostly just call the police, let them handle it.

“But see, I think there is always something to be learned from the old ways of doing things. If a man had to marry a girl in that situation, then he'd be responsible for her. He, not her father, would be living with the consequences of his actions. Now, I think that's very fair. But the problem with that is, he'd have too much control over the situation. He'd be, absolved. It forecloses all the other options.”

Hank grinned savagely, “I'm a nineties guy,” he mused, “I like to keep my options open. Sign here. I need to get back to work.”

**** 

Buffy awoke slumped in a bathroom stall with her face pressed against the cool metal partition. The whole front of her shirt was splattered with watery, insubstantial vomit. Clearly she should have eaten breakfast. “Buffy?” Willow called worriedly, apparently not for the first time. “Are you alright.”

Buffy wiped the vomit from her shirt as well as she could, which wasn’t well, and opened the stall door. “No,” she admitted, gratefully taking the glass of water that Willow held out to her. “I’m not alright.” She looked for feet under all the stalls again before adding. “I’m pregnant. Giles knows. I think that’s at least half of why he’s freaking out. I wasn’t not telling you, I just wanted to tell you all about this ghost thing before we got sidetracked.”

“Wow,” Willow said.

“I’m going to have a _baby_!” Buffy agreed.

“Wow!” Willow repeated, as if genuinely surprised that one condition might be expected to lead to the other, which Buffy guessed a lot of people might be. Her dad certainly was. And Giles. They were quiet for a few seconds. It was about to be a few seconds too long when Willow said, “I had sex. With Oz.” It was Buffy’s turn to be stunned. They would have talked more, but third period (Chemistry) was starting.

Both Xander and Cordelia were missing. Normally, their friends might have presumed they were blissfully committing lewd acts in a mop closet, but even with everything that was going on, Willow and even Buffy could not help but to have heard what everyone was saying about their breaking up, and why. _Maybe they’re somewhere making up?_ Willow suggested, scrawling on her notebook where it lay on the table between them. Buffy looked doubtful. _Obviously a misunderstanding._ Willow added. ‘Duh,’ Buffy’s eyes said. _But whose?_ She wrote. Willow gave nod/shrug of acknowledgment. Most likely the bystanders had missed whatever the fight was really about, preferring to take some sarcastic comment of one or the other combatant at face value because it was so fun to believe, which meant that Cordelia was probably still fuming about whatever the real deal was.

Buffy suddenly looked so very sad that Willow knew she wasn’t just thinking of Xander and Cordelia anymore. And then, Willow felt pretty low herself. Because she had no idea if or when she was going to get her mom back either. And the whole situation was so very much more entirely her fault. To distract them both she wrote: _I got asked to the Sadie Hawkins Dance, sort of._

Buffy smiled in the direction of a laugh. _Me too actually,_ she wrote. _What is it with the guys around here? They seem to have a problem with the whole 'ladies’ choice’ concept._ Then the light dawned. _Not Amy?_ Willow favored her with a look of miserable, apologetic acknowledgment. _Wow._ Buffy wrote. A second passed. _Was she mad?_ Buffy asked. _BOLO for curses?_ Willow looked more miserable and apologetic still. Buffy absorbed the implication of her look but couldn’t quite believe it. _??!!_ she demanded.

 _I need her help with my magic_ Willow explained, stopping herself just short of referring to something Buffy still didn’t know. Buffy was giving her a look anyway. A worried, skeptical look, closer than Buffy usually got to judging when only humans were involved. Willow felt extremely judged. The explanation she had given was not a good one. Well, at least Buffy didn’t look depressed anymore. But she did look more doubtful than reassured when Willow added, _I bet Amy could help us find a spell to talk to this ghost._

**** 

BEEP: “Hello... it's me... again.... Cordelia? If you're listening please... please call me.” BEEP: “Cordelia? Cordelia I love you, please, please pick up!” BEEP: “Cordelia, I'm sorry, okay? Look I know you're there this is stupid, alright? Just pick up.” BEEP: “Okay, so I shouldn't have said that last thing, I mean you have a right to be mad at me, I know that, I'm an asshole, just please, please, when you feel like it, if you feel like it, call me?” BEEP: “Hi, it's me, again. It's been... seven... and a half minutes [nervous laugh] so I'm getting you know a little better at waiting. But listen, if I could just talk to you... Please, call me?” BEEP...

Cordelia sat in her darkened bedroom, lights out, curtains drawn, and let the drone and warble of Xander's voice, punctuated by the beeping of her answering machine, wash over and around and through her, willing it to become a meaningless gray noise, like waves pounding on a rocky shore, like whales sounding. She sat cross legged on her bed, still wearing the pajamas she had thrown on without showering the night before, still in her streaked and uneven makeup. Her eyes were puffy and swollen, but she was no longer crying. She sat with a tea tray in her lap, dozens of photographs spread before her. Pictures of her with Xander. Every picture she had of him alone or with his kindergarten paramour or the daughter of his latest slut, she had already burned in a great, blazing fire in her bathroom sink, leaving the enamel slightly scorched, about which she did not care. Now with scissors, matches and an incense burner, she was setting about the more delicate task of cutting his hateful face and form from every photo they had ever taken together and sending each and every image of him to its own fiery oblivion.

This wasn't how she had meant to spend her day. She had meant to go see Harmony in the hospital. To swallow her pride, admit what a fool she had been, to beg the forgiveness of the one real friend who had tried to warn her about what a creep and a loser Xander really was, and to reach out to her in her suffering while she still might be low enough herself to reach back. But they weren't letting anyone in.

Whatever had happened to Harmony, whether she had actually gone crazy and tried to kill the principal like everyone was saying or whether he had really, truly given her a reason, something a lot stranger than either of those things was going on. The Harmony Cordelia knew, had known since preschool, would have never had the balls to confront anyone head-on like that without a dozen other people validating her every move, no matter how good a reason she had, or thought she had. Not even if she had been raped. Especially not, actually. On her own, Harmony could not bear up emotionally under a slanderous attack on her actually very natural hair color, let alone... something so viscous and personal. Without the support of a gang of friends or a mob of wannabes, Harmony wouldn't get mad or get even, she would just get hurt.

Cordelia's heart ached thinking back to that horrible day in the second grade, of the little blond girl with crooked teeth and crooked bangs that she had held in her arms in the girls room of East Sunndydale Lower Elementary School, while she sobbed and sobbed, crumpled in on herself like a paper doll, broken, betrayed, “You're supposed to be my _best_ friend. How could you... how could you... make fun of me like that? With _those girls_!”

“I'm _sorry_!” Cordelia had wept right along with her. “I just wanted... I just wanted to not be the one that gets picked on anymore!”

“I know that!” Harmony had wailed, “But you're my _best_ friend!”

And there was no argument against that. Not at seven years old with four years of history already behind you, back into the mists of time immemorial. The choice was laid before Cordelia stark and bare. She could be cool or she could be loyal. She could be a queen or she could be a friend. And she had wanted to be a queen. She had wanted it with all her heart. But with Harmony sobbing in her arms, crumbling into her, she had dug in her heals with the stubbornness of a Chase and made a third choice.

“Listen,” she'd said, “I'm smarter than all of those girl. You're prettier than all of those girls. We're richer than all of those girls. We can be _cooler_ than all of those girls. And we will be, together, cuz you're my best friend.”

“Promise?” Harmony had sniffled hopefully.

“I promise,” Cordelia had assured her, “always, no matter what. I promise.” And with the ironic, innocently-strivging-to-be-jaded smile of a bright almost-eight-year-old girl who thinks she's sophisticated because she can follow the plot of an R-rated movie it will take her years to fully understand, Cordelia had added, “I'm going to be the coolest girl ever. I'm going to rule this school and I'm taking you with me. Betty and Veronica Take Over the World!” And they had. And it had torn them apart.

Being the Queen, and knowing she herself had _made_ it happen, had made Cordelia feel validated, triumphant, but at the same time stifled; superior yet alone. There was so much that had to be done strategically, to suit her role rather than to suit herself. The pleasures of the popular life were bitter sweet, never to taste, always à la mode. But Harmony didn't see it that way. She more than triumphed in her role as the Queen's Handmaiden. She throve. Braces on, braces off, a few years hard study of trends and techniques in hair, makeup, clothes and strategic snubbing, and Harmony had taken to being a cold hot bitch like a fish to water. It frightened Cordelia sometimes to see her own power over people, the things they would stoop to and stretch to to please her. It never frightened Harmony, never seemed to make her feel tired or strained. They were the bitches, the enforcers, the wearers of the proverbial (but certainly not literal) red scrunchy. And that was the way it had to be. The way it was.

As hard a thing as it had been for Cordelia to walk away from all that she had worked to build over all those years, it had also been a relief, a release, not to have to keep it up anymore. Their was something thrilling about making that choice, to be _able_ to make the strategic 'right' decision to stay on top but to refuse, to get her righteous individuality on and walk away. Like a Veronica. But nobody really ever wanted to be Betty. And Harmony certainly wasn't. She was a Hydra headed Heather, the kind of friend who always made you feel like you were talking to a mirror, totally alone. After all those years, it had seemed the biggest relief of all, at last, to be able to forsake her, without guilt, to be the betrayed rather than the betrayer, to let Harmony have the Cool Rule of the School, while Cordelia sloughed her off and moved past her. To something more like being grown.

And then again there was reality. And the reality that settled on Cordelia, as she sat alone in her room, clipping and burning, was that she was not a Heather and not a Veronica, not a villain or a hero. She was a fool. A romantic sucker. Who had lost her best friend and her place in the world. Over a guy. A lying, cheating, stupid, dorky, too-poor-to-pay-attention guy. A guy who was beneath her. A guy who didn't love her. And her best friend was alone and suffering and forsaken by the world, even more than she was. And none of this ever would have happened, if they had stuck together, like she had promised. If she hadn't fallen for a creep like Alexander Harris.

God how Cordelia wished she had a friend now to help her, to put things right, and to make Xander pay, for everything she had lost, and everything he had done!

**** 

When the announcement was made in fourth period, all of the gossipers of Sunnydale High started having second thought about whether it was really Harmony or Principal Snyder who had gone nuts after all. There was wailing and gnashing of teeth among the ranks of every club and organization. Jocks demanded an explanation. Cheerleaders called for Snyder’s head on a plate. He must be out of his mind! There was no way they could get everything done before 4:00! If they had to have the _games_ before 4:00, when would they practice? And if they couldn't have the games, what was the _point_? Why have a High School at all?

And if Snyder was out of his mind, why believe him over Harmony? _Especially_ when no one was even allowed to talk to her, to find out anything for themselves. Clearly the authorities were covering something up. The principal must be fired, imprisoned, run out of town on a rail. Before the rest of the basketball season had to be forfeited, and the band failed to compete in All-Region and all the routines of the Drill Team and the Pep Squad and the Cheerleading Squad and the Swing Choir all went straight to crap. Ergo, Principal Snyder was guilty of rape, and of having Harmony locked away in a hospital to shut her up.

And it was in this atmosphere of seething unrest, that Mr. Miller found himself trying to impart a few facts about an unsettled period in American History to a restless, agitated group of eleventh graders. “Miss Summers!” he called hopefully, his eye alighting on one student whom he at least knew would be too out of the loop to be very caught up in any gossip or plans for student revolt, “Can you tell me how restrictions on child labor impacted the jobless rate in the U.S. in the 1930s?”

 _Grace gave James a miserable, longing look_ , “ _How are you enjoying that book I loaned you? The Hemmingway?”_

“Miss Summers? Ahem. Miss Summers?”

“Oh, um, I’m sorry,” Buffy murmured, “what was the question?”

“Child labor, Miss Summers?”

“Well... I’m against it,” Buffy said with a nervous half-smile.

“Its effect on the labor market, Miss Summers,” Mr. Miller insisted, much tenser than his usual self today, as everyone was.

“Well there was a market... as always... for labor... so if there were no children laboring... then there must have been more jobs for grownups to labor...at, which would give them more market power...”

“Thus driving wages...?” Miller prompted.

“Up?” Buffy guessed, making a pained face.

“Yes,” said Mr. Miller, “the effect should have been to drive wages up.

“Mr. Walker,” he said, picking another outsider to engage, “Can you tell me what factors if any mitigated this tendency of wages to rise in the face of child labor restrictions?”

At first, he didn't respond. Mr. Miller had the unsettling feeling that something was very, very wrong. He felt a... presence... he felt... called.

Buffy's attention, like everyone else's was caught by Mr. Miller's stricken look and sudden intake of breath. The class followed his eyes, which were fixed in terror on Cameron Walker as the boy rose from his seat, slowly, shaking. Suddenly, he held a gun in his hand, leveled at Mr. Miller. No one had seen him raise it. It was as though it had been there all along. Buffy was in motion, flying through the air towards him as he cried out from the depths of an anguished soul, as if Mr. Miller's question had broken his heart, “Don't do that damn it! Don't talk to me like I'm some stupid k—” An instant before the gun went off, Buffy's flying kick landed in the middle of Cam's chest. They were both thrown to the floor amidst a chaos of screaming, scattering students and overturned desks.

Suddenly, Mr. Miller found himself crouching behind his desk. He felt... more himself, but no less filled with terror. A few inches high and wide of where his head had just been, there was a bullet hole in the chalkboard. Buffy Summers was pulling Cameron Walker to his feet, twisting his arms behind his back and demanding, more of the room in general than of Cam, “Okay, so where's the gun?”

“Gun?” said Mr. Miller, getting his wits about him realizing what was happening, and not happening for the first time, realizing it right down to the horrible truth about Harmony Kendall, “There are no guns here, Miss Summers. This is a High School Classroom. Everyone. Please. Take your seats. Now!” Everyone looked at everyone else as if someone among them would know what to do, but the only person who seemed certain of anything was Mr. Miller, who was insisting that they all sit down. They sat down. He went on with the lesson. As if nothing had happened. They all might have convinced themselves that nothing had. But their was still a bullet hole in the chalk board.

**** 

“And nobody heard anything?” Buffy asked Willow, taking her tray and sitting down across a picnic table from her and Amy, whom she tried, even in her agitated state, to politely acknowledge. She still wasn't sure how she felt about Willow and Amy doing more magic, especially together, but she had to admit, they didn't seem to have a lot of great options right now.

“Well, we wouldn't,” Willow pointed out, “hear anything. Mr. Miller's room is soundproofed. It used to be the old music room.”

“The music room?” Amy asked, her eyes lighting with a spark of recognition. “Oh my God, I know what this is about. I know what all of this is about. This is about Grace Newman.”


	3. As You Wish

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Amy knows stuff about ghosts. Spike is a fool for love. Buffy tries one more time to bring Giles to his senses, with shocking results. And then Cordelia makes a wish.

“When I was on the yearbook staff freshman year,” Amy explained, “or tried to be, none of the older kids wanted me around. They'd all been working together, doing the same jobs, having the same laughs for a couple of years already. So they made me 'archivist'. I had to catalog all the old yearbooks and index who was in them, any unusual features or events from each year. It was make work, go away work, but I learned some interesting things, and when I would get bored sometimes, I looked up the things I found, and found out more.” The three girls huddled together around one of the smaller library tables, one of the ones that was rows of bookshelves that felt like walls away from the tightly closed door to the office where Giles was hiding, blinds drawn, classical music turned up, pouring over his goddamned books, trying to find the mystical means to dial 867-5309. Pushing down hard on everything she didn't want to feel about that, Buffy focused her attention on the book that Amy had spread on the table before them, the yearbook of Sunnydale High School for 1955.

“Oh, Wow!” Buffy said, looking an the full page glossy picture with it's facing blank verse obituary entitled In Memorium Grace Newman, “I dreamed about this woman!”

“And this guy?” Amy asked, turning to another page and pointing to the one eighth page portrait of a skinny kid in a letterman’s jacket.

“Yes!” Buffy replied stunned.

“James Stanley,” Amy said grimly, confirming the text that accompanied the picture.

“A student and a teacher,” Buffy acknowledged. “That make sense. It seemed, in my dreams I mean, like there was something going on between them.”

“Yeah, there was,” Amy confirmed. “Right up until he killed her. He shot her to death on the night of the Sadie Hawkins dance. Then he went into the old music room and blew his brains out.”

“Oh, god!” Willow gasped, “that's terrible.”

Amy nodded, cool and professional, seeming to enjoy the role of detached expert. “Terrible,” she said knowingly, “is what gets ghost trapped. Wishes that never came true, unresolved conflicts, unacted desires, the things that did happen that you can never...” her smugness seemed to falter a little, “never take back.” Amy dropped her eyes. Before she did, she glanced at Willow. Was it a longing glance, or was Buffy only imagining that? If so, Willow must have imagined it too. She shifted uncomfortably, her smile pained and guilty, her eyes sad.

“So,” Buffy said, feeling the sadness tugging her down, trying to keep pushing past it, “It's definitely one of them. Based on the violence and everything, I'm going to say him.”

“I don't know,” Amy argued sounding equally down, “being a victim can make a person feel pretty violent.” There was a shudder in her voice as she said this, of unpleasant memories. “I remember when my—during the whole... body swap thing, wanting to just smash the whole world to bits. If I'd had as much nothing left to fear as the ghost of Grace Newman has, I might have.”

“It's both of them,” Willow concluded miserably, adding her voice to the trio of gloom. “This dance they keep doing is a duet. Two to tango, just like Snyder and Harmony. Just like... all these other couples. They both died here. They're both trapped here. Playing and replaying their regrets.” Buffy startled just a little when she realized that she knew for a fact she was not imagining the look that Willow had given Amy when she'd said that. A look of miserable, helpless, agonizing apology. But more than that. This was not 'sorry I went a little out of bounds the other night' regret. This was ongoing regret.

“Well they were doomed from the start,” Amy said, looking dolefully into Willow's eyes. “They could never... it would never have worked for them. They weren't even in the right categories to be a match. Like two left shoes, or a sock and a glove. There's no resolving that.”

Buffy looked down at her hands to avoid the pitying look she could feel Willow getting ready to throw in her direction. Her heart and her stomach together were balled into one giant tangle of knots. She must be brainsick thinking she could be with Giles. That they could be a really, truly out in the open couple, a family even. She was not a partner to him, she told herself mournfully. She was a trap in which he was afraid of getting caught. A trap which he was so eager to escape that a fantasy of having to confront Jenny's vengeful spirit and be forced to repent and go back to his own adult kind seemed attractive by comparison.

“She was pregnant,” Buffy said. “That must be why he killed her. They were already trapped.”

“That doesn't have to be a trap, Buffy!” Willow assured her fiercely, taking her hand under the table in a way that got Amy's undivided attention.

Buffy pulled her hand away and turned from them slightly, letting her hair screen her scarlet face. “No,” she mumbled, “lots of ways out of that.” But their weren't lots. There was only one way out. One way that felt like saying, 'I give up. I don't deserve to have this. I don't deserve to have anything. Ever.'

~~~~

______“♫Run and catch. ♪

___________“♫Run and catch. ♪

________________“♫The lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.♪”

The sound of Drusilla’s singing echoed eerily through the ruined church. Edwards had retired to some dark corner with his convalescent wench to have quiet, urgent, pitiful sex, throughout which she continued speaking in tongues while he grunted softly like a man taking a difficult but long needed shit. Children or something chillingly like them cavorted and romped through dim, damp passageways filled with the shrills and echos of their chimp-like chatters and shrieks, playing some damned game.

Spike sat staring at the massive cross above the altar. It was covered with a thick purple velvet cloth that Edwards had found tucked in some hidey hole, but it was still there, staring back at him. There would be no hunting today, nor probably tonight either. Everyone had had their fill of Karl. A meal was not the issue. And not one of them was strong enough and sane enough and brave enough to go to the one night spot where girls young enough and old enough to be suspected of being virgins tended to gather in this town. Not and risk running into the Slayer. There was nothing left for Spike to do now but wait. Or dig. If they were really going to hunt and kill a dozen or more virgins in the halls of Sunnydale High itself before the new moon, someone had to actually do the hard work of connecting the main basement and other dark corners of the school to their network of tunnels below. Somehow though, with Dru sitting one room away, fondling Angel’s sorry withered carcass, rocking it, singing to it, giving it her undivided affection, Spike couldn’t quite make himself get up and go bust his ass on their behalf without even being asked.

God, how has his unlife come to this? Squatting in this dank, defiled yet stubbornly sacred hole, amongst this cavalcade of utterly useless freaks, bleeding the world’s least appetizing virgins for the chance to revive the smarmy, insufferable bastard that had made a life’s work out of fucking up his entire existence. He wasn’t Drusilla’s mate, never had been, not even in an enlightened twentieth century everybody’s an equal bloody partner kind of way. He was her servant, her fool, her bitch, her tool to be used to improve her life with Angel. From the moment she’d sired him, Spike had belonged to Drusilla, but she had continued to belong, as always, to Angel, her sire, her lover, the god of her idolatry.

Spike too had bowed before that idol in his time, Angel, the greatest of all vampires! Thus spake Drusilla, dark goddess of salvation. How could she be wrong? And so Spike had worshiped Angel, debased himself, called him Sire, Master and every title of love belonging on the lips of an underling. And what had it ever gotten him, besides fucked up the ass? Those days were bloody well over. Fuck Angel! Forget him, better still. Spike was as good a man, as good a monster, as good a master in his own house as Angel ever was or ever could be. Better. He ought to march right in there, pull Angel from Drusilla’s arms, grab him by his singed, bald, scabby, pustulent scalp and twist his scrawny neck until his head popped off. Then he ought to fuck that sorry, venomous, inconstant bitch within an inch of death right there among the ashes!

And then what? Drusilla would never love him after that, so what would be the point of anything? God, she would never be his. He would always be hers. Spike didn’t need any sodding Gypsy soul to curse him. Love was his curse. Love was the enemy of happiness.

~~~~

When lunchtime was over, the three girls said their gloomy goodbyes at the library door promising to meet back up after class, to go to Willow's house and try to hammer their scraps of disquieting information into a plan of action before the ghosts finished working up to their big dance which was liable to end up with someone newly dead. But one girl stayed behind and didn't go to class. She had something more important to deal with first.

Quietly, Buffy walked back into the library, steeled herself and opened the office door. She could see Giles in profile, sitting at his desk, muttering something in a harsh, guttural tongue that might have been German and furiously making notes on a white legal type pad from the books open in front of him. To say he looked obsessed would be an understatement. Calling it an understatement was an understatement. He looked like a mad scientist in a silent horror movie. Her courage wavered. Her stomach lurched threateningly, but she either had to fight or give up, and for Buffy, that wasn't much of a choice.

He looked up when she turned the music off, startled, poised to be annoyed, then seeing who it was bemused, and seeing the look in her eyes, at least for a moment, worried. “Giles,” Buffy said firmly, “I need to talk to you for a second.”

“Can it wait?” he pleaded, looking back down at his work, furiously scribbling a few more notes, “I think I may be on the verge—”

“No, it can’t,” Buffy heard herself saying, hating the harshness, the edge to her voice. There was a look of censure in his eyes, a slight frown to his lips, but she could not afford to back down. She pulled the book out of his hands and slammed it shut on the desk between them.

“Buffy—” Giles started to scold, his eyes once again burning manically.

She didn't let him get another word out. “We found out who the ghosts are,” she interjected forcefully, pushing the 1955 yearbook across the desk at him. “It’s this guy, James Stanley, and this woman—”

“You’re wrong!” Giles snapped, cutting her off. “It’s Jenny. She needs me to... to...”

“Jenny's dead!” Buffy shouted. “To hell with Jenny!”

“Of all the—!” he tried to interrupt, eyes blazing, angrier than ever.

“Goddammit, Giles!” Buffy shouted him down desperately, tears in her eyes “ _I_ need you! Me, right here! Remember me!?! Me Buffy, you Giles? _I_ need you!” Her voice was broken by a sob, she moved towards him, seeking his embrace, holding his eyes with hers. “I _need_ you.” she cried, “I. Need. You.”

Her words fell into dead silence. Seconds passed. Buffy stood awkwardly by Giles' chair as he remained firmly seated behind the desk. They were inches apart. He did not move to embrace her. He sat with his arms folded loosely across his lap and looked down at his hands. He picked up his pen and turned a page, ready to make another note. “Please, Giles,” she tried one more time, beside herself with fading hope and drowning grief, “I _love_ you!”

“I'm sorry,” he said quietly, carefully marking his place before looking up, “but I'm not, I can't be, the man you need.”

“What are you saying to me?” she demanded, her eyes hardening.

“It’s funny,” he whispered, sounding near tears himself, focused on her at last, “I remember very clearly, a little over two weeks ago—a lifetime ago—giving you a very tiresome speech about responsibility, about not being a slave to your passions. I should have been talking to myself.”

“Giles, Giles don't do this!” Buffy half pleaded, half warned.

“Buffy, I do love you,” he argued maudlinly, infuriatingly apologetically, “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t, but I can’t... be with you. That’s not what you need from me, or from life.”

Buffy’s lip was trembling once more, but her eyes remained hard. “Don’t you think maybe I’m the one who should decide that?” she challenged fiercely.

“No,” Giles said grimly, looking down at his own hands. “I don’t. As your Watcher, as a teacher even, I have responsibilities towards you that are not compatible with... a romantic relationship. It was wrong of me, selfish of me to put what I wanted, what I needed from you,ahead of my duty to do what’s best for you. And now—” he started fishing and fiddling, retrieving some paper from his jacket pocket.

“What’s best for me?” Buffy demanded, shedding new hot angry tears. “You seriously think getting _dumped, abandoned_ with your _child_ , is what’s best for me?” Her voice came out in a sort of strangled, quiet scream broken by a sob. She could barely breathe.

“I never asked you to—” he started to argue, to correct, to  _excuse_.

“But you did!” Buffy shouted, “You did ask! You said 'please' and I let you! I let you fuck me! I let you... I let you make me believe... Oh God! You said you _loved_ me!” Buffy wailed.

“I _do_ ,” he insisted miserably.

“Liar!” she sobbed. “If you loved me, you couldn’t do this to me! Giles, how can you leave me!?!”

“Buffy, I’m not going anywhere,” he tried to reassure her, oh so very reasonably, “I’ll always be here for you, emotionally and financially—”

“ _Financially_?!” Buffy howled, her voice a storm of rage and contempt. “You think I want _money_?”

“I only meant—” he began plaintively, reaching a hand vaguely in her direction.

Buffy backed away, shaking her head in disbelief, “If you touch me, I’ll kill you,”she declared bitterly. Her voice was hard and cold but hardly louder than a whisper.

Giles hid his face in his hands again. “Buffy, I’m sorry... I—This is how it has to be.”

“Then stay away from me!” Buffy declared.

“I can't,” he told her seriously, unfolding the papers in his hand.

“Why?” She demanded, “Because you're my 'Watcher'?” Her fingers actually made the quote marks. Her head rolled on her neck in a way that Giles usually thought of as an affectation, as seen on T.V. It didn't look that way in this instance. It seemed a very genuine and natural expression of rage and indignation, so much so that he had to fight the temptation to duck under his desk. Her eyes flashed, and he was physically afraid. “Quit!” she demanded, “let them send someone else. Someone who's not a liar and a coward and a... a... a thief!” She knew it wasn't exactly the right word, but she was hard pressed at that moment to think of a better one.

“I can't,” Giles repeated. His voice was dejected, his eyes miserable but his guard was up, elbows ready to fly up and block a blow to the head, legs taunt in anticipation of the need to jump from his seat and flee. He thrust those stupid papers towards her across the desk. “Your father,” he explained. “To punish me, he's made me your legal guardian.”

Buffy held in a scream. She covered her face in her hands but could not hold them still. They slithered up the sides of her forehead and into her hair, grabbing it in huge handfuls, her finger laced between the uneven blond clumps, clamping down on her scalp as if trying to hold her head on, trying to hold on to anything.

Buffy let go. She let her hands fall to her sides. Her imprisoned scream partly escaped in the form of a twisted, broken mockery of a laugh. “Well I guess I got my wish!” she spat searingly, “You and me, living together. Just like a real family! Exactly like. Wow! I feel so fucking loved I might smother to death! Well played, Dad! Teflon Hank is off the hook and poor Saint Giles is left holding the bag!”

“Buffy, I—” Giles started in again, eyes wide, horrified, stricken, as if he were the one being torn apart!

“Just don't!” Buffy warned, but when she stormed out of the office he followed her at what she guessed he thought was a safe distance, mouth working intermittently, clearly wanting to say more.  Glaring over her shoulder as she fled from him, all but walking backwards, Buffy ran smack against something that quickly turned out to be someone, specifically Owen Thurman.

There was no stopping at that point, momentum carried them forward and down, limbs curing around each other. She landed on top of him, tangled intimately in his arms. She had a ringside seat to the battle royal of emotions struggling within his eyes, within his soul, within his groin. Confusion, fear, hope, desire, concern, excitement, _longing_. Fiercely, resentfully, she kissed him deep and fast enough to leave the memory of her taste seared on his soul.  Leaping to her feet, pulling him erect as she went, Buffy shoved Owen from her, towards Giles and headed for the door. A hot second of brutal reflection later she called back over her shoulder. “You asked for it, you got it. Be at my house. Seven o'clock. Tomorrow night. Dress comfy. There won't be any dancing.”

Owen stood shaking his head as if to clear it, staring at the spot where Buffy had stood a moment before. “Man!” he declared when he finally found his tongue, “She is the strangest girl!”

“If you lay a hand on her—!” Giles began hotly, hands balling into fists at his sides. Checked by Owens confused, frightened, slightly offended look, he pulled up short and unclenched his fists, breathing out in frustration. “Look,” he finished with sheepish resentment, “just don't lay a hand on her, alright?”

“Why not?” Owen half challenged, “I mean, this morning, you said....”

“This morning,” Giles informed him coolly, “I wasn't her legal guardian.”

~~~~

Cordelia didn't spend all day in her room. At noon she got up and took a shower. She brushed her hair. She put on makeup. She got dressed. She had a plan of attack, but it wasn't enough. She got in her car and headed for the mall. She needed armor. She needed equipment. She needed supplies.

Three stores, two salons and one newsstand later, she was on her way to UC Sunnydale. She made it to the Student Union just in time for the slight off peak rush that happened every day at 2:55, five minutes after two Physics one Chemistry and one Astronomy lab all got out at once in the building next door. And just like that, clumsy Cordelia was accidentally bumping into a tall, lanky twenty something T.A., spilling hot coffee all over his turtle neck and khakis, while he was absorbed in his class notes and she in the latest issue of Scientific American. Except that she wasn't. Although she had looked very carefully before looking carelessly away, standing (coffee splattered) where the target of her stealth attack should have been was a girl.

“Excuse you!” Cordelia barked reflexively.

“It's okay,” the kind eyed, ash-blonde stranger assured her warmly, just exactly as if she had apologized. “It happens to all of us. It's hard to concentrate. When you're hurting.”

~~~~

Amy sat alone at Willow's kitchen table, trying to concentrate on the spell book she was scanning for anything to do with getting rid of ghosts, trying not to listen to Buffy upstairs balling her eyes out, choking on her own heartbroken sobs, trying extra hard not to resent the attention she was getting from Willow because of it. 'I'm not in love with _Willow_ ,' Amy tried to remind herself. 'I'm in love with Willard.' But her powers of self delusion were worn thin by the brutal realities of her short but hard hitting life. She could not deny they were one and the same person, each a different guise. Even though it had taken an exchange of X and Y chromosomes to make her see it. Even though it was the Y side of things that got her hot and romantically inspired. The one person she wanted to be with more than anyone else was none other than Willow Rosenberg. What was more, no matter how much she denied it, Amy knew that Willow truly loved her back.

If that was a surprise, or two, Amy realized, it shouldn't have been. Willow was the best friend she had ever had, admittedly of a limited number. And even if she wouldn't have said exactly the same thing of her at any given point in time, most of the good times Amy had ever had, she had had with Willow, sometimes with Jesse and Xander in tow, but mostly not. Jesse had never liked her. That was good and bad for Amy where Willow was concerned. Willow clung to Xander whenever he would give her the chance and she was deeply, intensely jealous of Jesse as the reason that he sometimes would not. But she couldn't say so, not to Xander. Instead, Amy had become the repository of all hostility towards Jesse and Willow had kind of loved her for it even then.

But then there were those times, more and more as they moved from Jr. High into High School, when Xander seemed to be able to hold both Willow and Jesse in a more or less balanced orbit. And Amy was the ball that got dropped in the juggling, the rogue planet that spun off into the void and was hardly missed at all. No, they hadn't always been close on a day to day basis, but sometimes they had, and when they had... Children are curious and girls will be girls, but... Amy had always been curious, first and foremost about boys while Willow had been curious about boys, but also about Amy.

Not that she had ever had the nerve to do anything approaching even Jr. High School lesbian sex, but there were moments: questions Willow asked,looks that she gave her, the ways that she had touched her shoulders, her hair and one very memorable time her breasts.... There had always been something there. And Amy had always been willing to share, to have a friend. How much better, how much potential now, to know that that friend could finally love her deep inside, the way she wanted to be loved. If that meant she had to love her, to make love to her even when she was wasn't being Willard, could you really say that wasn't fair?

Finally, after what seemed like hours, the wailing upstairs subsided. Willow came down. “She's asleep,” she told Amy, “I guess she's staying the night. Her dad went back to L.A. And I told her Mom was out of town.”

Amy sighed, as if burdened by Buffy's absence and distress, though she was not. “I guess it's just you and me for the research party,” she carefully commiserated.

“Yeah,” Willow agreed glumly. “It looks like it could be a long night.”

Amy sighed a little more genuinely. Now that she thought about it, it certainly might.

“You keep looking up spells, I guess,” Willow suggested, “and I'll make us something to eat. I'm sure Buffy will want something again when she wakes up.”

“As you wish,” Amy said. And something about the _way_ she said it, the way she looked into Willow's eyes, her nervous little smile, filled Willow with tenderness and regret.

“I'm sorry,” Willow said softly, “that we might have to miss the dance tomorrow night.”

“Yeah,” Amy agreed, “So am I.” There was a moment. They both felt it. A moment when something could have happened. But it didn't, and the moment passed.

“Buffy's pregnant, isn't she,” Amy asked. Willow gave her a miserable, won't confirm but can't deny kind of a look.

“God, men can be such jerks!” Amy fumed, expressing what Willow so clearly wanted to but couldn't under the circumstances. “How can they just dump someone in a situation like that?”

“Guys!” Willow corrected her bitterly. “There aren't any men left in the world, just older and older guys!”

“A man wouldn't do that to a girl,” Amy agreed, “A man would do what was right. He'd stick by her.”

“You're darn tootin' he would!” Willow declared. “I mean I could never live with myself if—” Amy found herself sitting up very straight, listening, waiting for the rest of that sentence.

Suddenly, there came a hesitant knock almost immediately followed by an urgent pounding on the front door. When Willow opened it, Devon sagged with relief, but his brow was still furrowed with unwonted concentration and worry when he asked, “Have you seen Oz? We were supposed to be practicing this afternoon, but none of the guys showed up. And I went and I looked for them everywhere, but I couldn't find them. And... and... things are weird everywhere and I thought like, okay, my dad will know what to do, but he didn't come home and he's not still at work, and it's like... like they all just disappeared off of the face of the Earth!”


	4. Unmanned

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cordelia: "I wish... that all men (except for the really dumb and agreeable kind) disappear off the face of the Earth!"
> 
> Anya: "Done!"
> 
> ~BtVS 3.9 "The Wish"

“M-m-more T-t-tr-tr-trauma victims, coming in, D-doc,” the young orderly stammered overwhelmed, letting the phone fall and dangle from the cord. “An-n-noth-th-ther unm-m-m-m-m—.” He hung his head at Dr. Wilkinson's nod.

“Goddamn it, I need another surgical nurse!” Dr. Wilkinson shouted. 

“We need a surgeon!” Nurse Patrick shouted back.

“Dr. Roberts is stuck at the Women's Center,” Dr. Wilkinson reminded her between barking orders for the care (or lack there of) of a dozen patients at once. They were taking casualties there too, using the lobby as another ER. 

“Fuck Dr. Roberts,” Patrick snapped back, “We need Dr. Heigle! Damn it Brab, we need a _trauma_ surgeon!”

“Pack and shunt,” Wilkinson said coolly to Nurse Garrison, who had brought another child on a gurney for her to judge. It was code for slow this kid's bleeding enough to calm his mother down and ship him upstairs to die of head trauma. They were putting the “tri” in triage tonight at Sunnydale General. Wilkinson stared Patrick down until she looked away, silenced, eyes and cheeks burning. She didn't need to hear again the mantra, 'We have to work with what we've got.'

~~~~

“Well would you look at that!” Spike grinned at Edwards, whistling as they walked along, “This is just... neat!” Everywhere they looked cars were overturned, crashed into storefronts, stopped on the roadway. There was screaming and crying from every direction. Women and children wondered the streets bleeding, lost. There was a 747 on what was left of the Mall. There was a little rescuing going on to be sure, volunteers volunteering everywhere. But ambulances and police cars were, sporadic, random, late to come. Firetrucks were notable by their absence. It was as if the first responders had all gone on break at once. 

“A few too many fires for my taste,” Edwards grumbled. The truth was, something a lot more subtle than fire unnerved him about the otherwise seemingly idyllic scene. He couldn't quite put his finger on what it was. “I think I'm going to just grab something and go back down,” he half apologized. “I want to get back to Zanya. She doesn't seem well tonight.” 

Spike snorted. “Fine,” he said. Unfucking believable was what it was. First Drusilla had insisted on staying with Angel, letting this unprecedented, Godsend, carnival of death pass her by and now Nancy Boy was pussing out as well. Only the brats had had spirit enough to come out and play. They were cavorting through the blood soaked streets like the happy little monsters that they were, with any luck getting themselves lost. 

“Please!” a woman appeared suddenly before them in the street, stout but not fat, plain but not ugly, neither old nor young, “Please help me, my son... he's trapped in the car and I can't get him out! My husband was driving and then—” Her voice caught in her throat as she got her first real look at the faces of the beings she had come upon. 

Before she could scream, Edwards caught her by the throat and squeezed until she ceased to struggle but not to breathe. “Have fun,” he said, trying to sound casually cheerful, but unable to banish a hint of worry from his voice. “I'll see you at home.”

 ~~~~

“It's the only thing that fits, ma'am,” the young adviser explained to the Acting President. She had been sworn in hours ago by the one accounted for Supreme Court Justice who agreed it was 'Constitutional enough'. The other two women who might have made a claim had been traveling internationally, had been in the air, with no hope of survival, when the crisis had come. Now she had to tell the waiting nation something. 

“I won't say it's the only thing that makes sense,” the young woman went on, “because it certainly doesn't, but as near as anyone can tell, 99.9% of all males over the age of fifteen have disappeared off the face of the Earth. It appears, at least from the reports we  _are_ getting and from anecdotal evidence to be a world-wide phenomena. And well, it would almost have to be because, our combat units are completely gone and close combat support units are at 12% fighting strength on average and... well... we haven't been invaded yet.” 

“Yet,” the Acting President replied grimly. 

“In contrast,” the young woman went on nervously, “less than 2% of women and children appear to be missing and that appears... easily explained by the estimated uncounted dead and displaced due to all transportation related causes.”

“Alright,” the Acting President declared decisively, “alert Secretary Tracey and General Kennedy to join us in the Oval Office for the live broadcast. Get Ginsberg and O’Connor both back in here and round me up a Senator and MC from each Party. Keep working on rounding up the ranking officers in each of the Cabinet level departments, and as many as you have by the time we go live, send them in. We need to project as much strength and continuity at the top as possible. We need to look like a government that hasn't just been decapitated. Because we are about to declare Martial Law!”

~~~~

“Excuse me, young man,” Mr. Beach simpered, “If … Do you think it's possible... if someone could help me get my car out of the ditch...” Summoning all his courage, he managed to tap the kneeling figure on the shoulder. It was only when it turned ,blood staining it's mouth, that he saw what it was kneeling over, the body of a savaged, dying girl. Mr. Beach wanted to scream, but somehow, at that moment, he couldn't find his voice. He wanted to run, but his feet stood rooted to the street. With a casual flick of the monster's elbow, it's hard, densely muscled forearm caught him in the face and he was permanently silenced. 

~~~~

“Another pocket,” Willow called over her shoulder to Devon, “Slow down and be ready to stop. Now!” Buffy leapt from the back of the van while the wheels were still in motion. “Tardus!” Willow and Amy shouted in unison. They stood in the back of the van, hands clasped, each extending her free hand towards the open cargo bay doors. Buffy flew in the face of the six suddenly sluggish vampires, coming at them from all sides at once like a fast-motion movie ninja. In seconds they were dust. Five victims, two women and three children, were hauled into the van. At a nod from Buffy, Willow gave the word and Devon took off. 

“Where do you live?” Buffy asked the older of the two women, the one who was least badly injured and seemed the most composed.

“In Elmwood!” she gasped, “We were just here visiting—” 

“Safe house X,” Willow instructed Devon. It was the closest. And Jessica was confirmed to be alive, and home. 

“Alright,” Mrs. Harris groused as the newcomers were rushed in, under cover of crosses, “but that's all I can take. This makes ten and even with the basement, this is only a three bedroom house!”

“Buffy's house is just as full,” Amy pointed out to Willow as they went in search of the next clump of civilians to rescue, “and yours, and Devon's and both of mine.” They were putting as many people as they could back in their own houses, but they couldn't afford to go more than a couple of miles to do it. It would loose them too much time.

“Well we can't just dump them at random houses,” Buffy pointed out. “The owners might be dead. Or they might come home and throw them out.”

“We've got to find a way to identify more safe houses,” Willow agreed.

“Or make more,” said Amy. “I mean... what makes a house a home? If we can figure that out... It's not just ownership, because they can come right in to rent houses when there's no one living there. But they can't come into either of my houses, even though I don't really still live in both.”

“But you used to,” Willow pointed out, “and you still own... or your mom does, in theory, the one you don't anymore.”

“Hey,” said Buffy, “That's a point! None of us technically legally owns our houses, even though we mostly live in them, so why do the vampires treat us like we own them?”

“Because _we say we do_!” Willow concluded wonderingly. “These are our homes because we made them that way by living in them, knowing we had a right! We... claim them, through our parents, like everybody expects! I bet, if we adjust our expectation, we can claim other places too!”

“But the claiming is only part of it,” Buffy worried, “What about the living in?”

“Um, that's kinda what we need it for(?)” Amy pointed out. Then, before Buffy could decide how to respond, “Devon! Another pocket!”

“Take Hazelnut,” Willow instructed, when they were once again in motion with a cargo of six eleven-to-thirteen-year-olds who had been wandering the streets since they fled the devastated Mall. “Then left on second.”

“Where are we going,” Buffy asked, worried she already knew the answer. 

“I thought of one other place we already have a claim to,” Willow said. “Or you do anyway,” she added apologetically. 

“Oh, no,” Buffy shook her head, “Giles is not my—Willow I'm not claiming—I don't –I'm not the one to inher—Oh, God!” 

“Buffy, I'm not saying...” Willow let her voice trail off. Amy was staring at both of them, her mouth hanging open in shock. Willow tried to find her tongue, to explain to Amy about the guardianship Hank had put in place that very afternoon, but seeing the way Buffy was already looking back at Amy, she could see there wasn't a point. “Buffy,” she said instead, “these kids need a home, at least for the five more hours until sunrise.  _We_ need to get off the streets. Amy and I are exhausted, and there's more vampires out there than you can fight alone. We need a place we can work from and get ready for tomorrow night and and, to try and figure out what  _happened_ . To see if... To see if—We need  _books_ . Buffy, we need that Condo.”

Buffy knew where Giles hid his key, which Willow assured her was just further evidence the house was hers to claim. “Believe it,” she said, the way they tell you to believe in Tinkerbell when you watch Peter Pan on stage. “Buffy, this house is yours. It's blood Buffy, it's family.”

“We should cook something,” Amy advised, “the three of us. Then we'll all sit down and eat.” Willow nodded. That met her definition of living in. The kids went to bed after supper, three little girls in Giles' bed, Devon on the couch, three little boys on the living room floor. It was two-thirty in the morning. They'd been off the streets a little over an hour.

“I should get back out there!” Buffy declared with quiet fervor. “I can feel them out there. Hunting.”

“Most people are either inside or dead by now Amy argued.”

“She's right,” Willow said. “The best thing we can do now is try to sleep a few hours. Then maybe we'll be able to think a little better and... figure out what's going on.”

The last place Amy could find to sleep was the little sliver of rug-lined floor under the table in Giles's study. Gamely, she searched a linen closet and came up with a sheet to lay on, a couple of extra pillow cases she could stuff with towels and a bedspread to go on top. She invited Willow to join her. “I... think I'll sleep in the bathtub,” Willow mumbled nervous, uncomfortable, distressed. 

“Oh come on,” Amy said exasperated, “We've slept on the floor together lots of times. It never bothered you before.”

“Oh, well, you know what?” Willow said defensively, getting agitated, because she was, indeed she was, as  _'embarrassed'_ as she had ever been before. “It bothers me now!”

“No fair,” Amy said, smiling and shaking her head. “You're the guy. That's my line.”

“Oh, yeah, well, then 'as you wish' is my line too if we're gonna quote movies at each other. And anyways, I'm not a guy and you know it, there's nothing I've got that you want to buy sell or process, so just don't alright(?)” With that, Willow stomped into the bathroom and slammed the door, leaving Amy to sigh over her temporary setback. And that was all it was. All it could be. Things had to work out for them, they just had to. Because she had found something even more amazing in these crazy times than just 'true love'. She held the secret to the heart of the last 'man' in the world.

Willow came out of the bathroom and looked at Amy, miserably, accusingly, as if she somehow could have arranged all this and said, “There is no bathtub. He only has a shower.” Amy smiled and held open the bedspread for Willow to crawl under. She neglected to mention that there was another bathroom downstairs. Willow lay down on her side with her back to Amy, a few inches away from her. There was no reason they had to touch at all. There was plenty of room. But Willow was waiting. She could feel herself waiting. She whimpered guiltily, miserably. 

Suddenly as if in answer to a half intended prayer, she found herself embraced in Amy's arms. Amy's breasts rubbing against her back, Amy's... everything else against her butt, like two spoons in a drawer. “You can kiss me if you want,” Amy whispered. “Touch me, finger me, anything you've ever wanted to try. And I'll do anything you want, too. I love you Willow. Any way you want it. Let me be your girl.”

“But Oz...” Willow began.

“Would understand,” Amy assured her. And oh, how Willow wanted to believe! “It's just you and me now, Wil,” she whispered, her lips brushing Willows ear, her hands roving over her breasts, belly and thighs, so far, only outside her clothes. “There's no one else in the world.”

“But we can't just give up,” Willow whined, trying, just for a moment, halfheartedly to rise, to pull away.

“No,”Amy agreed, holding her tight, not letting her go. “Tomorrow is tomorrow. Tomorrow we try again, to bring them all back, and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. But tonight, we are the only two people in the world.”

Sighing, helpless in her embrace, Willow rolled to face her lover. Amy closed her eyes when they kissed, but Willow kept hers open, gazing at the perfect brow of the beautiful woman in her arms. Her kiss was soft and wet and sweet, but also hungry passionate. It made Willow feel truly wanted, truly loved. The fact the Amy loved her  _even though_ she was a girl, and not because of it suddenly didn't feel sad or wrong anymore. It felt special, extraordinary, miraculous. It made her want to please Amy even more.

“Let me do it with my mouth,” Willow whispered, “Let me taste you while you come,” Her tongue was braver, there in the dark, in more ways than one. “Let me taste you,” she whispered, “and then I will change, for little while, if you want.” 

“Yes,” Amy whispered, kissing and nibbling her ear as she sighed that precious word into it. “Touch me. Kiss me. Lick me. Make me come.”

“Let's get undressed first,” Willow whispered. 

“Let's,” Amy agreed, a smug smile evident in her voice. Slowly, carefully, they pulled each other's T-shirts over their heads, each caressing the sides and arms and breasts of the other. They were both already without bras. Bare chested, they spent some time exploring, warming up, kissing and fondling. This was something two giggling little girls had done before. There were no giggles, no nervous titters now. They were not little girls.

Willow put her hands on Amy's ass under her pants and panties, kneading and massaging it, before pulling them down. Amy wriggle the rest of the way out of her pants as Willow got out of her own, impatient to be naked in her arms. “Oh, God, Amy, I love you!” she groaned as their bare flesh, damp already with sweat and desire, fell together in glorious unity. 

Amy pulled Willows hand to her lips and kissed it, then sucked one and another of her fingers inside, loving them with her tongue, sensuous as a cat bathing lazily in the sunshine. Willow took her damp fingers from Amy's mouth and rubbed them against her thighs, her pubis, her lips her clit. Then she tasted them, caressed them and wetted them in her own mouth before sliding them inside the open, waiting, flower of pink flesh at the center of Amy's spreadwide, welcoming thighs. 

Carefully, gently, appreciatively, she thrust and rubbed and wriggled her fingers inside Amy's cunt, rubbing her stiff little clit with her thumb. If Amy spent more and more of their time with her eyes closed, this could be overlooked. Willow found herself closing her own eyes again and again after all, briefly at least, as she was overcome with passion and sensation. It didn't mean anything. Girls don't make love with their eyes.

Amy was shuddering now, and breathing hard. The wet smell of her sex was intoxicating. Willow lowered her head and pulled back her hand, breathing her in. Anticipation of that taste was like a drug. At last, when she could stand it no more, on the verge of overdose, she dove in. Oh the way that soft, pink,  _female_ flesh curled and slid around her hungry lips and parted before her eager tongue! “Emmm!” Amy moaned, “Oh, Wil, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh oh, Willard! Willard! Willard! You're the one!” 

A tiny piece of Willows heart broke. Fat tears of resignation, of regret rolled down her face, ignored in the dark. “Okay,” Amy whispered, “time to change.”

~~~~

When dawn came, Buffy finally slept, on the floor between Giles' bed and the wall, so none of the girls would have to step over her when they got up. Anyway, in a weird way, it felt sort of secure in there. Tight. Womblike. 

By noon, when she woke, there were Humvees on the streets, as the television and radio had told them to expect. Not so many in Sunnydale. Only a couple. More of a symbolic presence. But live broadcasts from L.A. looked something like an invasion. Or a desperate bid to deter one.   Around the nation, there were already 250,000 uniformed women and girls aged 17-55 in the streets and bearing arms. The call had already gone out for reservists and veterans to report to be reassigned to active duty and for all good women to enlist and come to the aid of their country. The Acting President and her newly minted Joint Chiefs of Staff were boasting plans to have two million pairs of boots on the ground by the end of the month.  There was debate over whether recruiting would be high enough.  There was talk of a draft for anyone over seventeen who was not already pregnant or raising a child under five.

Schools were being touted as the place to go to connect with missing loved ones and to obtain vital supplies, teachers pressed into service as the logistical backbone of the disaster stricken country, doing the jobs the National Guard might if what remained of that force were not otherwise occupied. Devon had taken the children that morning and gone, hoping to help get them back to their mothers. Too late, Willow had heard the rumor on the internet and instantly known it must be true. It made too much sense. All boys over ten years old were being taken into protective custody. They were too valuable a resource. And too much a temptation for women and girls who might soon be looking for a means to avoid national service.

“We'd better call the other safe houses,” Willow suggested to the other two girls, “If no one has gone to the schools yet, they might need to know they're proceeding at their on risk.” No one answered at Devon's or Amy's dad's or Amy's mom's and Jessica Harris reported that all refuges had left her house for places unknown. There was still a thriving little community making itself at home in the house on Revello Drive. For now Buffy left them to it.

But at Willow's the girls got a real shock. As the one remaining stranger with no place left to go home to reported, there had been a search for more space, the better to comfortably spend the night. The one locked door which they knew they must not open, they had opened. And so, in the morning, when the school buses had come around, seeking those in need, they had put in for an ambulance to take Sheila Rosenberg to the hospital, to try to assess her medical condition. Her daughter, the one who had told them not to unlock that door, was now wanted by the District Military Police Command, for questioning. If she could please stay, make the house her own and open it to relatives of hers who might be in need, the woman would tell no one they had been seen. They spent the next half hour loading up all of the magical supplies, computer equipment, clothes and keepsakes they could get into Sheila and Ira's cars. They headed back to Giles', to Buffy's, Condo.

Buffy made sure to ride back with Willow while Amy drove the other car. “Alright,” she said, when the door closed and they were alone, “I didn't ask any questions in front of that woman, but now do you want to tell your best friend what the hell is going on?” Willow explained. Buffy asked questions at first, but then she stopped. Because every answer she got only left her feeling more in shock. And more alone. More like she was not sure anymore if there was anyone she knew or should trust. Because even though Willow still seemed like Willow, even though she had always been a very good friend, a very good person, or acted like one, how could you not  _want_ your mom to wake up?

“Should we be staying here?” Willow wondered, when they got back to Giles's and started to unpack. “I mean, Amy, you're mom's place is a  _lot_ bigger.” 

Buffy and Amy both shuttered and exchanged a look of complete agreement. “That place creeps me,” Buffy said. Amy nodded. They stayed at the Condo. 

They had their work cut out for them (even with all of Giles's personal library, Amy's volumes from Katherine and the worldwide web at their disposal) finding an explanation, let alone a remedy, for this suddenly all wrong world. But first, Amy showed Willow how to perform a glamour on herself, for a disguise. 

“If it's got a hope of working when we're apart,” Amy explained, “the power has to come through you. It might not work right away the first time. Major glamours can take months, even years of practice” she warned, “We'll _try_ a full makeover, but if you don't have enough juice, especially after all of that mojo we worked last night, we might have to focus on one major feature, like your nose or eyes and then dye your hair or something.” It wasn't a problem. Willow thought of different features of different people she knew or had seen, women who looked as little like her as possible, women who would be a thousand times as unsought after by the new regime. Then she burned the herbs and said the words that Amy told her. Soon, she looked like a forty-year-old brunette with gray roots and crooked teeth, six months pregnant with coke-bottle glasses and flat feet.

“Wow,” Amy said, “I'm impressed.” She sounded impressed, but maybe just a little jealous as she added, “Pretty soon, you'll be the one teaching me.” 

~~~~ 

“Honey?” Ms. Kendall ventured uncertainly, her nervous smile painted on. “The doctor says I can take you home now. What with... everything that's going on. They think you can rest better at home.”

Slowly, Harmony looked up from where she sat on her bed, as far back in the corner as she could sit, knees pulled up to her chin, her back and right side pressed against the wall. Tears streamed down her face. “He raped me!” she wailed angrily, “and  _you_ put me in here! I wouldn't go home with you if you were the last mom on Earth! I want to call Cordelia's mom! I want her to take me home!”

“Please,” Ms. Kendall pleaded, “I'm sorry, please come home. It'll be getting dark soon. You weren't out last night, Honey. You didn't see... those  _things_ .”

“I don't care if it get's dark!” Harmony declared. “I don't care if I get killed! I'm not going home with you!”

 ~~~~

“Still no answer at Cordelia's?” Buffy asked. 

“None,” Willow confirmed. “Do you think we should go check on her?” she asked doubtfully. 

Buffy shrugged. “No, she probably just left town. Jetted off to some private island where you'd never know if all the men fell off the face of the Earth or not. That's what I'd do if I had a metric crap-ton of money.”

“Still,” Willow persisted. “I think we should at least check. I mean she has been pretty much like a friend these last couple of months.”

“Cordelia's not anything like a friend,” Amy put in derisively, “Not to anyone. Not unless she can get something from them. She's spiteful and rude and hateful and a force for evil in the world! Jesus! Am I the  _only_ one who remembers why we _started_ the We Hate Cordelia Club?"

“Oh my God!” Buffy was flabbergasted. “Wow, what are we like twelve? In case you haven't noticed, Amy, this is not a test!  _This_ is an actual emergency(!) The T.V. did that, like, emergency signal thing, and then it was followed by actual instructions! From crazy, terrified women with guns! This is what those of us who've been dealing with this stuff for years like to call 'an apocalypse', the really bad, already way past local kind! I think it might be time to get the hell over the We Hate Cordelia Club!”

“You just said we didn't need to check on her,” Amy pointed out. “I was backing you up!”

“Well I didn't ask you to back me up!” Buffy snapped back at her. “I can handle... I can handle....”

“Oh!” Amy breathed out, relishing her epiphany. “I know what this is about! You're pissed because you finally ran into a problem bigger than you are! Bigger than some little vampire you can back down with your holier-than-thou attitude or some dime-store prophesy you got from your Senior Division toy-boy! It hurts to know it might not always be all about you! Like you might not be the special queen of everything if you actually need some  _help_ to save the world!” 

“You know,” said Buffy acidly, clamping down hard on her temper and harder on the grief that was bubbling under it, threatening to push it to the surface. “If it wasn’t for Giles, the best thing you could _hope_ to be by now is dead. He gave you your life back after your own mother took it from you. Don’t you _dare_ speak of him like that to me! Not—especially not—!” Buffy collapsed sobbing into Willow's arms. Willow glared at Amy over her shoulder.

Amy sighed, chastened, but not very. “Say,” she said, only a slight sarcastic edge to her voice, “we've got about a half an hour before curfew. I think I'll go check on Cordelia.” After all, Amy thought sardonically, she's our 'friend' now, not at all the biggest bitch in the entire world. 

~~~~

“Professor Walsh,” said the young lieutenant grimly, entering the desert bunker, her shoulders thrown back, at attention, resisting the urge to salute, “We just got confirmation from NORAD. General Mutter is on base and the site is secure. They have not been able to determine any... method of attack. Nothing has come at us from the sky but our own falling aircraft. Whatever this is Professor, it's on your turf.”

“No,” Walsh shook her head. “No HST is capable of this. None I've ever studied. There are a few that can cause small distortions in Space-Time... but... This is a completely different world.”

“Never-the-less, ma'am,” the younger woman replied, “my orders are to escort you to Washington. The President, the _Acting_ President, wishes to see you at once.” 


	5. They're Baaack!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The geists are still poltering, but Buffy and her friends (and enemies) have bigger fish to fry. But when Buffy interrupts Willow and Amy at an.... ummmm 'delicate' moment magic ensues with surprising results. I just know you're all shocked to hear that!

“It's time we were getting home,” Ms. Barton, the Acting Principal said, firmly, courageously to the Officer in Charge. Her teachers were behind her. Way, way behind her. But she stood firm for them all the same. “It's after five o'clock. It'll be getting dark soon.” No citizens had dared to come to them for help in almost an hour.

“You think we're punching a time-clock here?” the power-mad twenty-year-old barked back at her. “This is a National Crisis and you will do as you are told!” For emphasis, she gestured with the point of her assault rifle of authority. 

Mr. Barton stood her ground. “I won't have my teachers in this place after dark,” she insisted. “Not on tonight of all nights. There have been incidents all day long.”

The girl in the uniform laughed loudly, then stopped abruptly. “You're all staying and that's an order!” she snapped. There had been a few (hundred) snakes in the building when they'd first come in this morning. Obviously something to do with their spring mating season being disrupted by chaos and fire. But that had all been cleared out. Since then? Hysterical women and children, hearing strange sounds, seeing strange sights. Music coming from radios that no one could find. A dead man behind them in the mirror. Yearbooks that threw themselves off of shelves and hit people in the head to get attention. All nonsense of course. All the result of terror and a sleepless night.

“There are six of you and twenty-three of us,” Ms. Barton retorted. “The only way to keep us here is to shoot us all. Are you prepared to do that?”

“Try me, old lady,” the girl snarled, leveling her gun at Ms. Barton's face. She too had had a sleepless night. Teachers and soldiers alike eyed the standoff uneasily, wanting to intervene, not daring, afraid for their lives. Suddenly, from far way, slowly building as it came towards them down the hall, a faint then ever increasing buzzing sound was heard. Soon it was too loud to be ignored, one by one, those assembled turned and saw, then struggled for a long moment to understand, to believe what they were seeing. 

The moment broke. One woman then another shouted “Run!” All threats of interpersonal violence forgotten, they abandoned their equipment and supplies and fled the oncoming swarm. They watched from across the street as the cloud of wasps surrounded and enveloped Sunnydale High. 

****

When Cordelia's phone rang, yet again, yet again she chose to let her machine pick up. She did not want to talk to Willow or Buffy or anyone else. Not yet, maybe not ever again. She was not sure exactly how she had done... whatever it was she had done, but she knew damn well that she was the one who had done it. She had just been rambling on, bawling her stupid eyes out about Xander Stupid Harris and how all men should just die or disappear or something when all of a sudden that sweet good-listener girl Anna has turned all scary and veiny and said, “Wish granted!” 

And suddenly, they were gone. In a flash, Anna had snatched her necklace back and disappeared, just as suddenly as she had come. To the sounds of planes trains and auto mobiles crashing, making thousands of people die. 

After a moment, Cordelia realized she was not hearing her answering machine pick up. It wasn't her line ringing. It was her mom's. Mrs. Harris didn't have an answering machine. She didn't need one. She never left the house. “Cordelia,” she called miserably, “Will you get that? I'm not up to talking to anyone.” The phone rang for about the fourth or fifth time. “Please,” her mom said, “It might be important.”

“Hello,” Cordelia huffed resentfully into the phone. Her ear was met with the wrenchingly familiar sound of a certain girl crying. “Harmony!” she gasped. She stopped short of asking what was wrong. 

“Cordelia! Cordelia!” Harmony wailed, “Oh God! Oh God! Come pick me up!”

Cordelia didn't hesitate or argue. She wouldn't have if she'd wanted to. There was no time. In half an hour, direct sunlight would be in dangerously short supply. Besides, it was almost Curfew, and from the look of the hardware they were packing, these women meant serious business. 

****

Mrs. Dunstan Chaired the meeting. She wasn't elected Chair. She just came in and sat in the middle one of the seven tall, throne-like chair that occupied the high dais that had always been reserved for the Equals of the Inner Council. She just happened to bring a gavel. No one challenged her. She was sitting as the newly acclaimed head of the House of Flavia, her husband's House, not the House in which she had been Enrolled half a century ago, a house that had never until yesterday, despite it's name and history, Enrolled a female Watcher. But she was Peter Travers' daughter. At seventy-six, she was also the oldest actual Watcher in the Council Chamber. Someone had to Chair the meeting.

On her right, from the inside out, she was flanked by Bridget Smith, the new head of the House of Hippolytus, Elizabeth Marle, who had been chosen to lead the House of Facundus largely on the grounds that she had a strong claim to that Seat through neither of the usual lines of decent, and the enterprising Dr. Laura Sterling, who upon losing her bid for the Facunian Seat has suddenly rediscovered her deep roots in the now otherwise non-existent House of Weregelder, the 'Giles' Seat. It wasn't as though there were so much competition for the honor of coping with this disaster that a determined and experienced Watcher could be lightly turned away. On her left, Emma was flanked by Constance Hathaway, her second cousin and the actual head of the Travers House, Lydia Hawthorne, a girl of thirty-two who had accepted her ascension to the Gaudencio Seat with a chilling combination of self-importance and insecurity, and Meredith Spooner, head of the newly restored House of Lucianus, replacing the daughters of the House of Ezariah, who, having been called to Council, refused to come.

The room was packed, row on row, with perhaps two hundred grim-faced women and children. The dozen remaining Watchers of the Outer Council, together with two dozen Candidates and Senior Staffers who were presently to be Enrolled, crowded near the front. Behind them sat forty-two girls aged nine to fifteen possessed of a certain uncertain destiny. Wives, mothers, daughters and sisters of the Watching families, for whom the work of the Council had been nothing but a vague shadow that fell, almost unnoticed, across their otherwise ordinary lives, had spontaneous formed a third level of Council, listening, but also asking questions, voicing their concerns. A score of somber boys and their mothers had come primarily seeking the Council's protection from the rapidly solidifying military government. They had heard what was already happening in America and elsewhere. And in the midst of them all, arms folded, leaned back in her chair, feet propped on the rail in front of her with studied, defiant nonchalance, sat The Slayer. 

“The Ezarian women know nothing,” Ms. Smith explained impatiently when the meeting had lingered too long on the topic of the various things rumored to have gone missing in the keeping of that House. “I myself spoke with the mother and sister of their senior American representative, Mr. Crowley, and I tell you they hadn't the dimmest notion what I was getting at. Were not all the events of the last two days so extraordinary as to render anything plausible by comparison, they'd have written me off as insane.” 

Ms. Smith just had made a swift but tiring and at times quite harrowing journey from Boston _with_ her unruly charge in tow, obtaining authority to leave the United States under false pretenses and crossing Ireland's hostile airspace under the mercifully hollow threat of anti-aircraft fire. She was impatient to get down to what she saw as the real business in hand. “We may as well pine for the ancient records of the Council of Rome as those things which the now extinct House of Ezariah has lost. We must attend to the present crisis, which is no doubt just beginning. Does it strike no one as more than coincidental that humanity has lost it's good right arm and most of its means of perpetuation at the exact moment in history at which we find ourselves with an unprecedented number of Potential Slayers in our ranks? Sisters, I would venture to suggest that The End—” a hostile murmur anticipated her pronouncement of doom before she could complete it.

“Ladies! Ladies!” Emma cried severely, banging her gavel, directing her harshest scowl at Bridget herself. “There's no sense losing our heads. Whatever these events portend, we must be prepared to face it as it comes! Now then, whatever else we may face, we are here today, first and foremost, to deal with issues of Enrollment and assignment of Watchers. Then we must address the issue of identifying and finding the survivor, if any, of the two previous Slayers.”

This remark set off another dull roar, the loud aggregate of much quiet disputation about the mechanism of the the activation of Slayers and what the existence of Faith did or did not suggest about Kendra and Buffy's fates, together with several somewhat louder expression of consternation that such a thing should be discussed in the presence of the Potentials. “Well, considering the interference of this new regime in the United States with telecommunications, it may be some time before we are able to determine any of this definitively,” Lydia pointed out. She judiciously refrained from explaining the insurmountable evidence that existed in support of the grim truth of the Gaudencian Hypothesis, by which it could clearly be demonstrated that Faith's calling proved that both Buffy and Kendra were no more, the absence of a living Slayer being the obvious catalyst for the calling of another. It was enough that she knew her Sisters in the Inner Council shared this view and would act accordingly in setting policy and allocating resourced. 

“Indeed,” Emma agreed, grateful for the invitation to close the subject. “What we must now address is the issue of Enrollment, or more to the point,” she said, her eyes falling heavily upon a tiny knot of women from whom the others had managed, ever so slightly, to distance themselves even under these crowed conditions, “Re-Enrollement.” Her steely gaze lingered a long moment upon a figure who stood apart, shunned, even by these, but by no means humbled by their shunning. As desperate as they were for personnel, the Inner Council's vote to recommend had been so close that the entirely inexperienced membership of that body had been obliged to spend precious time studying the records of previous sessions on the issue of procedures and percents for vetoing. But there were far too many women in the Watching Families, not privy to all the details of what had gone on before, who would have seen a refusal to Re-Enroll any willing Watcher as a spiteful squandering of priceless resources. Besides, in light of the need to maintain the appearance, for the benefit of these same women, that not all of the Council's assets in the Americas had been given up as lost, Emma has just the assignment in mind to keep her wayward kinswoman occupied, far, far away from the secrets and power sources of the Council. And therefore, with the gravest of misgivings, the Equals of the Inner Council had at last voted to recommend the Re-Enrollment, as a Watcher in Good Standing, of one Gwendolyn Post, _Mrs._

****

“She'll be _fine_ ,” Amy assured Willow yet again. “I talked to her mom. It took her like forever to come to the door. She looked like a wreck, but then I guess... we all are sort of. She said Cordelia went to pick Harmony up from the hospital. Score one point for the collapse of Patriarchy anyway. She said they promised to be home by dark and she'd tell them I stopped by in case they want to give us a call. Where's Buffy?”

“Out on patrol,” Willow said tensely, worriedly, trying and failing to focus her attention on whatever it was she was looking up on line. She was trying to research the idea of a space-time disturbance that might only affect men, but it was coming up all feminist theory and thought exercises. Sighing, she shut off her laptop. “I don't think we're going to find anything on the internet for this,” she said miserably. “So far, the only cause that's been discussed for a world without men is women wishing them away.”

Amy sighed. “I don't know what she thinks she's doing out there,” she groused. “What if she gets spotted? Even Buffy can't fight the Army, not even what's left of it. And if she tries, she's going to get us all in trouble.”

Willow smiled wanly. “I wouldn't worry too much about Buffy,” she advised. “She can be stealthier than you'd think when she actually wants to be.” 

****

As much as he resented it after last night's free-for-all, Spike kept to the shadows. For one thing, it was still twilight. But really he was avoiding the patrols and he knew it. He tried to tell himself there was no shame in it. He was just being prudent. Or maybe streetwise was a better word. He liked that idea a lot more. Only a bloody piker would let himself be caught out in the open on a night like this. Spike just plain had better sense than to let himself in for that kind of trouble. He never liked getting shot in any case, but these ladies had the kind of guns that could take a bloke's head off. 

He might not have gone out at all. He wasn't particularly hungry. But Dru was still hell bent on trying to revive Angel, and the days were slipping by. With Sunnydale High converted to other uses (possibly for the duration) and the female population scared off the streets by last nights revelry, a new strategy was needed for virgin hunting. So, Spike made his way, stealthily, by tunnels and back alleys, to the campus of UC Sunnydale, to a freshman dorm. 

There were no guards here save a token presence at the campus perimeter, enforcing Curfew. He casually broke open the locked back door of Stevenson Hall and walked in. He strolled down the hallway until he found a very likely looking door. One that bore a poster of several tiny kittens, frolicking against a pink background, savaging balls of string.

Spike knocked quietly on the door, with calculated hesitance, then, deliberately waiting not quite long enough to reasonably expect a response, he knocked again, his strikes rapid and irregular but still not loud, speaking of fear and urgency. A slightly pudgy sandy-haired girl of about eighteen soon opened the door, looking very shocked indeed. She wore a hip-length, faded Sunnydale High tee-shirt over a pair of baggy pink shorts with a pair of fuzzy pink slippers bearing the faces of pigs rather than bunnies. Obviously dressed for bed. 

“Please,” Spike begged, casting a theatrical glace over his shoulder, “they're _after_ me. I need a place to hide!”

The girl did her own quick inspection of the proverbial coast before whispering, “Come on!” and ushering him in. “You should be safe here, for tonight anyway,” she assured him. “My roommate already went and enlisted. So,” she added with one very nervous smile, “It's just us.”

“Hey,” he said philosophically, “the more of that kind the better. If they have enough volunteers, maybe there won't be a draft after all. Me, I like my freedom a little too much, I guess. Besides, it's not my nation to service.” He allowed himself a shyly flirtatious grin. The target blushed very auspiciously, but of course, that alone was not a conclusive test.

“William,” he introduced himself, offering his hand. 

“Megan,” she replied, squeezing it. Spike held on to Megan's hand a fraction of a second too long, gazing deeply into her eyes. She blushed even more, turning from him slightly. He pretended similar embarrassment, as if feeling something as surprising to him as it was to her.

He was enjoying this game, coaxing her innocence out of hiding, testing it's totality. He was her kitten and she was his bright pink ball of string, waiting to be pounced on and unraveled. 

“I didn't bring any pajamas,” he apologized. More blushing. Almost too much to be believed. Almost. She offered him a long tee-shirt and her roommate's abandoned bathrobe. She turned around so he could change, but he caught her resisting the urge to peak. He took off his shirt but then 'hesitated' to remove his tee-shirt. “Can I ask you something?” he asked, sounding as wistful and he could _remember_ ever feeling. “Do you... did you, have a boyfriend, someone special.”

“No,” Megan said quietly, with the kind of tiny, sneaking, needy hope that told him he could press his luck a little harder. People get hungry not knowing where their next meal is coming from. And sweet young girls who love kittens believe in fate. 

“Have you ever had a boyfriend?” Spike asked. 

Megan shook her head. She was still bushing, but she was also looking him straight in the eye, growing bolder. “I'm a virgin,” she said. He believed her, certainly, completely. Each took two steps towards the other. He leaned in. She tilted her face upward and closed her eyes. 

Spike softly placed his left hand on the back of Megan's head, stroking her hair. With his right hand, he twisted her face hard to the left, snapping her neck. Grinning as he watched her lifeless body crumple to the floor, Spike crowed to himself, “Thank Heaven for little girls!” 

****

When Buffy saw it, she almost laughed. She didn't. She was in no fit state for laughing. That way lay hysteria and breaking down into a puddle of gibbering flesh on the sidewalk. Still, a swarm of angry wasps enveloping Sunnydale High School? A knot of terrified soldier girls huddled together in the park across the street, watching as if for an explosion? The fact that all of this was a manifestation of a temper tantrum being thrown by a couple of ghosts locked in an eternal lover's spat? The impossible reality that 36 hours ago she had been _consumed_ by the immediate need to solve such a 'major crisis'? She almost laughed. _Sell tragic someplace else; we're all stocked up here!_

Otherwise, the streets were quiet. The vampires were either too sated from last night's feast to bother with the slim pickings offered by these embargoed streets, or else they too had been scared off by the patrols that kept the women and children indoors, obeying Curfew. By eight o'clock, the Slayer was ready to call it a night. Along the way, she walked past the house on Revello Drive. Lights were on inside. Standing under her window, between the house and the tree, Buffy could hear soft music and a murmur of voices too low to distinguish words or feelings. She almost cried. But she was in no fit state for crying, either. She vomited on the roots of the tree and went home.

The door to the condo was in it's typical unlocked state. Something about that fact made Buffy more than typically tense. One tiny, plaintive Willow-whine/cry/sigh, and she was in motion, leaping over the high back of the green sofa, not daring to waste time to walk around it, too much lost already. She landed on top of them, stake raised. Naked, pungent, dripping flesh collapsed beneath her, sucking her into their heap of tangled limbs like spittle into lips not damp enough. 

Amy screamed, then shouted, “What the fuck!?!” over Willow's panicked incantation. 

“Tardus!” from the Latin, meaning to slow. But now everything was happening too fast. Light and sound swirled around Buffy like madness. Flesh flew from beneath her and she fell hard against the shaggy green almost-velvet cushions. The rodent squeak of voices sped up beyond deciphering filled her ears and set her teeth on edge. The temperature dropped ten degrees in a heartbeat. Moonlight through the windows suddenly ceased as if a switch had been flipped.

Then things started to get weird. 

****

It was midnight when Spike left Stevenson Hall the second time. He threw the huge burlap sacks from the physical plant down into the tiny bed of the miniature lawn tending truck (an electric contraption half again the size of a golf cart) and hopped down after them, whistling cheerfully. Then he stopped. 

The night was so quiet that the tolling of the bell in the old clock tower reverberated in the silence like the death knell of mankind. Spike shuddered, imagining a world without humans. The thought caught him off guard. The catch. The down side to the end of the world.

But it would never come to that, he tried to reassure himself. After all, the first thing the Bitch Fascista had done, even before ferreting out the few timid masculine souls left on the planet, was to nationalize all the sperm banks. He was sure the youth of the nation would soon be popping out babies for Truth, Justice, the Honor of the Grand Republic, the Greater Glory of Om, etc.... And for the eventual consumption of hungry vampires. 

Truthfully, the herd had been due to be thinned a little. In fact (Spike smiled at the fanciful thought) maybe this was all the unintended consequence of some novice wizard’s attempt at ecofriendliness. Or intended for that matter. You never could tell with humans. They were, after all, as one of their contemporary (well _recent_ ) luminaries had so succinctly put it, only _mostly_ harmless. 

****

_Oh please, oh please! Please, God, let this work!_ Willow repeated in her head over and over; a dull, incessant internal murmur playing over, under and round the very different Latin words that she was chanted aloud in unison with Amy but barely heard. _Oh please, oh please, God, if you ever loved me, let this work!_

It was well past one a.m. Buffy remained prone on the couch. She had turned and lifted her head somewhat over time, but at this rate, sitting up would take her at least another day or two. Willow and Amy had spent the better part of five hours researching and experimenting and had finally come up with one or two spell removal possibilities worth trying.The first (a simple cry to the gods to undo the Retardation spell the two girls had ginned up from bits of other spells without thinking of the need for a limiting condition) had failed with a spectacular lack-of-even-a-thunk, like an engine not even trying to turn over. The second (a countervailing speed-up spell) had scared Willow too much even to try. If they overshot, she had realized with sudden horror, Buffy could die of starvation or even old age before the two witches would have time to react. 

And so they had skipped ahead to Plan C, the current incantation. _Oh please, oh please! Please, God, let this work!_ Loudly, forcefully, in disconnected mouthfuls, in rhythm without reason or rhyme, the two girls hurtled words at the Great Powers of the Universe. Words which, as near as they could tell, spoke of calling upon the spirit of one paralyzed with illness, grief, madness or enchantment to requicken to abundant life, though the distinction between waking and returning was so muddy in the light of their imperfect understanding of the language, that Willow felt a forlorn, wistful, wishful hope that somehow the spell might 'backfire' and bring back all the men instead. Maybe even her father. _Oh Please! Oh Please! Oh Please, God!_

Buffy remained motionless, another unexplainably inert body for the now ever present authorities to stumble upon. Amy wished she had her mother's deep sources of power at her disposal. She wished it so badly that for a moment, she even wished for her mother. It was a terrible thing to be without a mother, even a terrible mother. Even a nearly useless mother like Sheila Rosenberg, would have been at least something to lean again in a world where all the fathers were gone. Poor Buffy could certainly have used a mother's love in her state of acute and utter fatherlessness, and her mom, at least, had been, by all reports, up to the job. 

“Please God!” Willow cried aloud in sudden, startled, startling English, “Please, Dear God, BRING THEM BACK!”

The air stirred, the barometric pressure dropped. This time there was no question but that the engine turned over. 

****

Zanya watched. Quietly. She had ceased to speak more than a day ago but her eyes seemed more alert. Edwards tried to take it as a good sign. At any rate, Drusilla's ceaseless, lunatic prattling was madness enough. And if it were not, their was the howling, chittering counterpoint of the demonlings at play. Most days, Edwards didn't mind them. Sometimes he found them comfortingly familiar, an echo of a bygone life. Maybe of more than one. With his Zanya. But today he was tense and they set his teeth on edge, the way children do when they caper obliviously about you while the world goes to shit and you have to hold it together by some as yet undiscovered means that you are trying desperately to figure out. 

“Pst! The Witching Hour!” Drusilla suddenly declared, a new bounce to her endless elliptical capering step, giggling with glee. “I can hear the witches witching!” It was well past midnight, but if that had anything to do with what she meant she'd never know it. That was, assuming she 'meant' anything. Edwards shook his head and laughed a dry mirthless laugh.

Zanya Watched. Quietly.

“The dead rise and writhe and boil and coil! Spss! Spss! Whispering like snakes. But no one hears them. They are all alone. Calling... always calling,” her mood swung suddenly from amusement to distress. “Mummy! Mummy! Where are you hiding? Come out please! I give up! I'll be good! I'll be good! I promise! I promise! Come back!” Just as suddenly, her hysterical wailing broke into fits of renewed laughter like waves breaking on shore. “An apple! Spread wide and free! Invite him in just once for tea!”

“Invite the monsters nice and mean!” shouted Caris, a girl of maybe six taking up the rhyme with gusto, clapping her little hands, “The pedlar or the wicked queen!” 

“Shush!” Drusilla chided with sudden school-marm harshness that surprised everyone. Even Zanya sat up a little straighter. “You're talking out of turn,” she went on, shaking her head and wagging her finger, her voice taking on a eery sing-song quality, gentle yet censorious, like a nursery school scolding. 

She took three slow steps towards the child as she spoke. Caris smiled uncertainly. She had no idea who she was dealing with but Edwards certainly did, and Ryan (bright boy that he was) was catching on. He tensed at Edwards' tension and all the children with him. Morah, a girl of four, began to whimper and then to cry. The other three gawked expectantly, eyes shining with the hope of witnessing something horrific. They were not disappointed.

With a sudden, catlike pounce Drusilla was on the child. Caris shrieked once, high and wordless as a rabbit. Drusilla's claws dug into the sides of her head as she twisted and pulled it from her tiny neck while her chubby, little-girl legs dangled and kicked helplessly. Ryan opened his mouth and raised his fist, ready to shout his outrage at this arbitrary and purposeless destruction, but in the face of his sire's shameless, predatory glee, his courage failed him and precocious wisdom kicked in. He turned his rage on Morah, clouting her on the side of the head and telling her to hush and quit being a baby. 

Drusilla held the little head aloft by the hair, grinning triumphantly, as it burned to smoke and dust. The tiny body disintegrated as it fell away, never reaching the floor. “We need to be quiet while Mummy's talking,” she all but sang, her tone one of gentle, loving reproof. The three gawkers lost there smiles and stood blinking at the sobering reality of extinction, subdued. 

Suppressing a shudder at his own thrill of blood lust and spiteful amusement at the tiny creature's demise, Edwards turned and left the room, wheeling Zanya with him. 'Dear God!' He thought, and almost literally prayed, 'It cannot be that this is what I am. How is it? How has it come to pass? That I am not a man!' 

Zanya was speaking again, quietly but urgently, authoritatively. In her own language. 'Escaped!' The idea struck Edwards in the heart and filled him with longing. 'You are free at last my darling!' He formed a conviction. A quiet certainty. There was no such thing as the next best thing to being alive. For centuries the gray world had tasted like ashes on his tongue and he had been a slave to desires the satisfaction of which brought him no joy. Taking Zanya in his arms, leaving behind the wheelchair that she would not be needing any longer, he headed down the tunnel towards the mausoleum entrance. To find a pleasant spot to wait for morning. 

“NOW!” a voice shouted as he made his was across the graveyard. Edwards was just about to be annoyed with himself for the silliness of being startled, when a very different feeling jolted him like a few thousand volts of electricity. Exactly like. 

****

Lighting didn't flash. In fact, there was no light at all, but it happened as suddenly. Ira Rosenberg's once empty brain was suddenly full of terrible truth and memory. His eyes flew open but this made no difference. The darkness was total. His heartbeat went from zero to sixty in an instant and kept going, passing a hundred beats in less than a minute. He didn't so much hold his breath as have no air whatsoever from which to draw another. He remembered well where he should be. But he had no idea what to do about it. No one was coming for him.

****

“Ira!” the patient cried out, as if in the throws of terror, sitting bolt upright in her bed. 

“Oh my god!” cried the horrified orderly-volunteer-whatever and ran to fetch someone who might be able to explain. 

“I do,” said Dr. Rosenberg, quietly, bitterly, when a young nurse had finished explaining that they had no idea why she had awakened or what was wrong with her in the first place. The two other women waited expectantly, but she did not elaborate. Instead she asked, in a clam, clear voice that for some reason made them both uneasy, “Where is my daughter?”

****

_ Where is she? Where is that wretched, ungrateful, pubescent bitch!?!  _ Katherine growled in frustration, nearly blind with rage. Fire shot from her eyes. Literally. If the halls of Sunnaydale High had been made of anything but institutional tile work and hidden asbestos, the building would have been set ablaze. 

Katherine held out her hand and reached across the room with her mind. The ax shattered it's glass cabinet in it's eagerness to obey, to come to her. She grasped it firmly, more for the way that the having of a tight grip on something assuaged a tiny bit of her rage and made it easier to think than because she really needed a weapon. Her enemies were no match for her. They were dead as soon as she got within casting range. 

Her mouth twisting into a horrid grin at the sweet thought of vengeance, Katherine turned the corner and … walked right into an impenetrable wall of angry wasps? 

****

_Okay, this is weird._ Suddenly, Joyce wasn't in her prison, wasn't in her 'room' or 'on stage'. She was... lying on a pile of garbage? It stank like garbage. It felt like garbage. It looked like garbage. Did the demon world _have_ garbage? Okay, it probably did, but somehow Joyce doubted it had quite so many rusted out appliances. 

Getting cautiously to her feet, expecting at any moment to be shouted at and dragged back into line, Joyce cast a guarded, hesitantly hopeful eye to the sky. She wept at the sight of familiar stars. Orion! And Sirius! Like a boy and his dog! Polaris and it's beautiful long-handled constellation! Close enough to grab and take a drink! 

There in the midst of the mountains of refuse, Joyce Nuland laughed and sang and jumped for joy. She was free! She was alive! She was home! On Earth!

****

“Damn it!” Amy cried, “Nothing!”

“Don't say that!” Willow pleaded, near tears. “I _felt_ something _happen_! I know it! We just have to... wait. Another minute. Or two.”

The clock ticked. A fly buzzed. Crickets chirped outside in the courtyard. Buffy remained motionless.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If the Councilly parts have you going "WTF, who are these people and What on Earth are they talking about?" There is a lot of exposition about the structure, history and function of the Council in "Who Do You Think You Are?" which I've decided to consider as read for purposes of this story.


	6. Someplace That's Else

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cordelia just said 'off the face of the Earth'. She didn't exactly say where. So, Anyanka reasons, it's not cheating to take the opportunity to put them somewhere... interesting.

"Where the Hell are we?” Hank demanded. He sounded as if he might not have been asking for the first time.

“What the devil?” Giles not-exactly-answered. A moment ago he had been test driving a sporty-looking little red convertible along the streets of Sunnydale at a frustratingly uninformative 35 miles per hour. Now he was standing in the desert on a very cold night. With Hank Summers, of all people. The sky was filled with unfamiliar stars. He supposed the most logical explanation would be that he was dreaming. But it didn't feel like a dream. It felt like real life. And like real life, it continued to roll slowly forward, moment by moment, without skipping.

“We must have past through... some kind of portal... for some reason,” Mr. Giles mused aloud.

“Well,” Hank sneered, “that clears everything right up(!) What the fuck is going on?”

“Well, if I knew, I would certainly tell you,” Giles countered with suffering dignity. “God knows it's none of _my_ doing.”

“Bah!” said the horribly familiar voice of a professorial old gentleman, appearing around an outcropping of rock and approaching them. “If there's sorcery being done (and so it would seem) I've no doubt who's behind it!”

“Father!?!” Giles spat, almost as angry as he was flabbergasted.

“Yes, you fool,” Andrew Giles all but snarled, an _educated_ snarl. “Who'd you think it was? And who's this then?” he added with a small, cruel laugh. “Your 'partner'? Is that the polite term for you chaps these days?” Hank cleared his throat, looking both confused and uncomfortable, not to mention angry. Giles didn't know if he was trying to process the idea of whether it was better, worse or even possible for his daughter's lover (or victimizer or however he thought of Giles) to be 'gay' or just struggling in his Californian way with the political incorrectness of resenting being mistakenly called queer.

Giles put on a small, carefully ironic smile of his own before replying, a deliberate hint of boredom rather than hurt in his voice, projecting mild annoyance, almost indifference, rather than anger. He made his eyes participate in this smiling. “To wound, the stoke must first land,” he said lightly. Which should have been true. But there is something inherently crippling in the knowledge that one's only parent would like very much to run him through, even if words happen to be his weapon of choice. Most especially if they haven't always been. 

Besides, even though they both knew that the stroke was not quite to the heart, they both also knew that it landed close enough to draw a little blood, and that Andrew was empowered to reveal the details of why this should be so, which were sordid enough to damage a man's reputation, even in the most liberal quarter of San Francisco. Perhaps especially their, actually. Certainly it was nothing he wanted Hank Summers to ever know.

“Do _you_ know where the hell we are?” Hank demanded of Andrew, changing the subject while finding a way to express his own hostility and instant dislike to the old gentleman that was acceptable by his own lights. “Or how the hell you got here?”

“Perhaps we've all died and gone to hell,” suggested yet another appallingly familiar and ironically amused voice, somewhere between a purr and a yawn. Ethan Rayne oozed into view from amongst a thicket of scrubby little trees, moving as unhurriedly and as unseemly fluidly as a cat. He was wearing nothing but a geometrically patterned black and silver silk robe, which fell only to his mid thigh and clung so smoothly against his flesh as to leave no doubt whatsoever regarding his otherwise nakedness.

Giles blinked, startled yet again for a moment, then found a little space to sigh with resignation and to coolly appreciate the biting humor of the situation before the icy-hot anger began to spread through his veins. Indeed, Sartre himself could not have chosen him three better companions for an eternity of torment. “Ethan,” he began in a hard, hot voice of barely suppressed rage, tempered by dignity rather than mercy, “Whatever you've done, undo it this instant or I will thrash you within an inch of your miserable life!”

“Ripper, _Darling_ ,” Ethan cooed sardonically, ganging up on him with Andrew just for a vicious laugh like the spiteful little imp he was. “You ought to know me better after all these years. If I were going to dump you on a desert moon 70 light years from Earth, do you think there is one single chance in hell that _I_ would be here with you?”

“70...wait, _what_?” Hank was nearly apoplectic. Normally, he'd have dismissed the idea too easily to be alarmed or shocked by it. But the sudden and unfathomable means by which he had been transported here made anything seem plausible enough to get worked up about, especially coming from someone who seemed to possess the very rare quality of having a fucking clue what was going on.

Andrew Giles wasn't buying. “What's this burk on about, 'light years'?” he demanded of his son. “This looks precisely like an Earth to me.”

“ _An_ Earth,” Hank mumbled numbly. He was much too sure that he had heard the old man correctly.

“In fact, I'm quite certain that I felt myself pulled through a _dimensional_ disturbance,” Mr. Tweedier-than-thou was insisting indignantly. Hank shook his head but kept his mouth shut this time. A dimensional disturbance. Sure, why not?

“How do you know where we are, exactly?” Giles asked Ethan skeptically, his temper cooling a little in the face of the apparent probability of what Ethan had said, specifically that he'd be watching any torment he himself inflicted from a very safe distance if at all possible.

“I maintain a location charm which gives me instant and perfect knowledge of my exact location relative to the center of the Earth at all times. The Earth, not An Earth. I don't pretend to know how we got here and if you say it felt like a dimensional disturbance, Professor, I can't argue with you, because that is one thing I've never actually tried myself, but I know _where we are,_ with absolute certainty. Not that I can attach a name to the place, mind. I don't even know if it has one, but we are just about exactly 70.236 light years (he smiled a little more impishly, genuinely amused) North by Northwest of Earth, navigating from a point extending out from the North Pole and relative to Good old Greenwich as the Earth happens to be turned at this moment. Or to put it another way,” he added, momentarily frowning a little at the thought, “someone very powerful and with a keen sense of humor hates us all quite a lot. Which, I would say, puts our exact location somewhere between the ass end of nowhere and in very deep shit.”

This man, whoever he was, seemed to Hank to be not nearly displeased enough with his assessment of the situation. He wasn't thrilled, but he was something considerably to the cheerful side of resigned. That and the confident way he stood at his ease, half-naked, and casually lectured three men in suits and ties, two of whom clearly knew and hated him, was unnerving to say the least. “Who the hell _are_ you?” Hank wondered aloud, feeling something akin to genuine awe.

“Ethan Rayne,” he said, smiling in a sort of privately amused way that made Hank reluctant to grasp the hand he extended. “I'm an old mate of Ripper's from better days. When he wasn't such a stiff old closet case.”

“You can stop calling me that any time,” said Mr. Giles tersely. Hank found his hand enveloped in the other man's for the lack of any clear direction to take in avoiding it. Something about being touched by this man felt indescribably, unpleasantly intimate. Hank tried to tell himself that it wasn't because he was putting such a fine point on the fact that he was gay but rather because of the-not-quite-the-same-thing-as-friendly way he managed to turn an handshake into a sort of digital caress. That and the fact that he clearly had an unpleasant history, apparently at least to some degree a sexual one, with the man who was currently banging Buffy. Or had been until they had found themselves _seventy fucking light years_ away from Earth!

Hank felt a strange combination of numb acceptance and defensive anger. Both of these feelings were seeping in the direction on blind panic. Never mind about magic and dimensions and any of the rest of it. Never mind that Buffy's cradle-robbing, hell-n-gone-from-being-a-boy 'friend' had a gay ex-lover who called him by a nickname worthy of a serial killer. They were not the fuck on _Earth_. They were someplace else. There was a big, gravely looking planet hanging in the night sky bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the moon. “How are we going to get home?” he demanded of no one in particular. “I mean, what are we supposed to do? Stick out our thumbs and hope for a damn UFO to come along?”

At that exact moment, the ground began to shake. Not more than a quarter mile away, a dark, clunky looking spacecraft, lit from beneath by a blue-white light, began to ascend into the sky. Hank didn't know whether to climb on a rock and wave or to throw himself to the ground. Then, suddenly, the sky was filled with a loud, gruff, gravelly, anguished, amplified voice. “Damn you Bridget! Damn you to Hades! You broke my heart in a million pieces! You made me love you, and then you—I SHAVED OFF MY BEARD FOR YOU! _Devil woman!!!!_ ”

“Well,” said Ethan nonchalantly, “that sounds like the end of a conversion it might have been interesting to hear the beginning of.”

“It sounds like perfect English!” Giles countered excitedly. “Bloody hell, I'd kill for a flare gun!” His eyes darted around the dark, baron landscape in the frantic but vain hope of discovering some means by which to make their presence known before the craft departed. It was already very nearly too late. “Damn it, Ethan,” he shouted in frustration. “Use magic! Do... something!” It was too late; the craft was gone.

“Might I suggest,” Andrew suggested coolly, deliberately, hiding from all but his son the fact that he was shaken, “that we ask this 'Bridget' to suggest a mean of transportation.” No one had a better suggestion to make. They all started walking briskly in the direction from which they had seen the ship arise and depart. They had covered more than half the distance but were still not in sight of anyone when a pistol shot rung through the night, from precisely the direction in which they were headed.

Hank threw himself to the ground. The first shot was followed almost immediately by another. Andrew froze and waited. Ethan brought himself more casually but no less quickly to a stop, becoming visibly more alert. Rupert, of course, both Andrew and Ethan noted with what was very nearly a shared sigh, was already gone, throwing himself through the night like a third bullet. Towards the danger.

****

Oz felt strange. Stranger than usual. Stranger even than what was usual lately. All of his senses were open wide. He knew that it was dark from the quality of the lights and shadows around him, but he could see as well as day. He looked down at his hands, half expecting to see fur and claws, half assuming that this was what it was like on the nights that he couldn't remember and that this must be one of those times. Where had the rest of the month gone? he wondered. He had thought he had a few more days.

He had been right. His arms were still covered in casts, of course, but his hands were no hairier than any other young man's. His fingernails were round and pink. Still, Oz felt strange. His pain, though still ever present, was dull, almost seeming distant, while the world around was drawn into him or he out into it, turning his perspective inside out. A whole world of smells enveloped him, so thick and close he could taste them all. He was not in a wild wood, as his eyes tried to tell him, but rather, in a large park, surrounded by a city packed with mice and men, crawling over one another to find a tiny bit of space, of peace; pissing and shitting and eating and fucking, vomiting and giving birth, killing each other and dying of cancer, stinking of hard work, fear and lust. The noise they all made was a collective hiss, just at the edge of hearing.

Oz lifted his face to the sky, trying to orient himself. He didn't exactly disbelieve what he saw, but he sniffed repeatedly for confirmation and found that once again the evidence of his senses remained in conflict. Either that, or he was behind the times, he realized. He must have ( _they_ must have, he corrected as a familiar scent suddenly registered, cutting through the general stench) traveled through time! What else could explain the fact that he was standing at the heart of a human city, beneath an alien sky.

****

Giles's impulse was to warn the man, to order him to drop the gun. But armed as he was only with a fist sized rock, having nothing whatsoever to his advantage but the element of surprise, he didn't dare. As it was, the man dodged at the last second, taking the blow in the shoulder rather than the temple. He did not; however, drop his gun. He leveled it at Giles but kept his eyes on the girl. He cursed copiously in some sort of garbled pidgin of Mandarin before demanding of her, perhaps ironically, “Good lord, woman, what have you got, a waiting list? Are you the next ex,” he asked Giles failing to sound casual rather than caustic, “or the last one?”

“Only a man who disapproves of holding women at gunpoint,” Giles replied crisply, warping his terror in defiance.

“Delicate, helpless creatures that they are(!)” the gunman sneered.

“I never said that,” Giles replied coolly. “I don't really approve of holding men at gunpoint either.”

“No,” Ethan agreed, sauntering through the treeline and into view, “never did. Ripper always prefers a knife or an ax, don't you, Ripper?” He sounded intolerably amused and pleased with himself.

Mal looked both men up and down thoroughly for the first time. The one who the... he was going to go out on a limb and say 'high class male escort'... kept calling Ripper didn't look much like someone who'd earned a name like that. He looked like a Gorram librarian. But then again, so did Niska. People mostly look how they want to look, not how they are. Then again, guys like Niska didn't go around spontaneously risking their lives to save damsels in distress. Only idiots like Malcolm Reynolds did stupid things like that.

Mal sighed. “I think we have a misunderstanding brewing here, boys,” he said, lowering his gun but not putting it away. “See, where you're thinking you see an innocent girl, I'm seeing the cold-blooded pirate who tried to kill me and my crew to steal my ship out from under me about a half a year back. Now, I'd offer to leave her here with you when my ship comes back for me, but I wouldn't be doing you any favors seeing as how she's liable to turn around and do the exact same thing to you.

“So I'll make you a deal. You boys get on back to your ship, finish up whatever shenanigans brought you out here to this lonely little rock in the first place, and get on with your business while I get on with mine. Do we understand each other?”

“We have no ship,” Giles confided. He didn't have a great deal of reason to trust this man, but he didn't see that he had a lot of options. Anyone could see that this was the kind of place people came only to avoid being interrupted. God alone knew how infrequent opportunities to get off this moon might be. Even if it wasn't for the risk of starving or being killed by some unknown alien creature, he did not fancy the thought of spending days, months or years stranded in the wilderness with Ethan, Hank and Andrew.

The gunman was incredulous. “You mean you've got your...” he used a Chinese word that could have meant 'friend' but clearly didn't “...out here prancing around the scrub brush, in that getup,with no place to bed down? Pardon me for saying so, and what you boys do is your business, but I just don't see the point in that.”

“I told you we should have just gone back to my place,” Ethan teased, clearly enjoying the whole 'misunderstanding farce' a little too much.

Giles gave him his very best exacerbated look, but he was unchastened. “Look here,” he said to the owner of a mode of transport that appeared to be set to arrive soon, “Ethan is not my... paramour. This is not some sort of... romantic rendezvous. We are stranded out here, and I won't bore you with the detail, but it is vitally important that we get to Earth at once and we will see to it that anyone who helps us is richly rewarded.”

“Earth?” Mal asked puzzled, “What Gorram planet is that on? Who'd go and give a place a bad-luck name like 'Earth'.”

“I'm not exactly superstitious,” Bridget agreed, “but that? That's just plain bad taste.”

“I don't recall asking for your opinion,” Mal reminded her coolly, raising the muzzle of his gun slightly for a moment. He lowered it again when he saw the uneasy look exchanged by the two 'just friends' from 'Earth.'

“Look here, mate,” the one in his nightgown started in in a lets-be-reasonable-about-this kind of tone that Mal hated hearing almost as much as he hated having to use, clearly in talk this lunatic out of killing us mode. “All we need is to get to the nearest place with a working commercial space port. Can you help us out with that?”

“We'd be most appreciative, I assure you,” Andrew chimed in, strolling up to the group with Hank in tow, ready to contribute to the resolution of the crisis now that discussion instead of gunfire seemed to be the order of the day.

Mal cursed fluently in about two and a half languages concluding with, “who in the rutting verse are you?” He spoke most directly to the gray-bearded seventyish gentlemen with the authoritative attitude about bravely showing up once it was pretty clear he wouldn't have to fight, but he didn't exclude any of the four of them. “How did you get out here anyway?”

“That's not important,” said the old man smugly, extending a hand. “Andrew Giles,” he explained. “This is Mr. Henry Summers, Mr. Ethan Rayne and... my son. Rupert.” The old man's distaste increased exponentially with each name he spoke. His hand hung in the air, untouched, until had last he had no practical choice to withdraw it.

“No offense,” the cocksure, self-important young fool explained, “but I find shaking hands with my piece drawn to be something hypocritical not to mention dangerous, and anyhow, since I am the one with the gun, that means I get to decide what's important, so now, I'm going to ask one more time very politely, then I'm liable to get impatient: Who are all you people and what are you really doing out here?”

****

“How'd you get up there?” Oz asked.

Xander looked down from the top of the twenty-foot lamppost onto which he had materialized. He was pretty sure Oz was being a smart ass, but his delivery was so deadpan there was no way to be really sure. “Look,” he said crossly, for once in no joking mood, “ just find me a latter or something alright?” It was hard to tell from where he was clinging, but Xander would have almost sworn that he saw Oz smile, just a little. But even if he did, it wasn't for long.

“Unknown Citizens!” shouted a loud voice supplemented by a megaphone, “This is a restricted access area. You are bound by law to stand down!”

“Stand Down?” Xander cried, beside himself, “Don't you think I would if I could?” The man with the megaphone ignored this, and started yelling in Chinese. Oz spread his hands wide and held them as high as his casts would allow. He could smell the excitement of their four unseen attackers, their bored but still vaguely hopeful blood-lust, not really expecting to get to kill or even kick ass, but ready. They lived in the confidence of those who know they will always be obeyed. There was not a whiff of fear or uncertainty among them.

“Chill,” Oz advised Xander firmly but quietly, “These are cops. We're getting arrested. Don't make trouble.”

 ****

He hadn't meant to take them onto his ship, not a one of the five of them. It had just... happened. Things seemed to just happen a lot lately, a circumstance Mal was growing mighty tired of. Saffron (or whatever her name was) was locked in a cabin for everyone's safety, but the other four were roaming around the passenger dorm, doing that trying-hard-not-to-say-something-that-let's-on-we're-not-what-we-seem thing that made him so very nervous about all of them.

How it had just happened was also troubling. They had still been discussing things, getting in no kind of rush, while the crew loaded the ship. They had been tossing around the idea of Mal sending word to some localish merchant to fetch them within a day or two in exchange for a pair of genuine 'Earth That Was' artifact pocket watches and trying to ignore the little woman's constant interjections that she knew where they could get their hand on far more priceless memorabilia of that era. Then, suddenly, River Tam, who had wanted to help load 'so she could feel some sky on her skin', had gone more than usually crazy.

River had started screaming and carrying on like she had done back on Ariel when she knew the Fed's were coming. No kind of plan had been reached for how else anyone might ever be getting off that moon alive except aboard Serenity. Also, Mal didn't love the idea of leaving four or five hostile, betrayed-feeling folk behind to have a chat with the Alliance about his activities if they did happen to show up. Besides, they had all seen and heard River. About the only two things his could have done were to kill them or take them on board, and he had not one shred of evidence for the concept that a one of them, outside of Saffron, had ever done a thing worth dying over. Certainly not to him or his they hadn't.

“This is crazy, Mal,” Zoe said, coming up to him privately, quietly, after they were in the black. “Sir,” she added at the look he gave her, but she didn't back down. “Sir, we have to quit doing this. They got nothing to offer us but trouble. And if we keep taking on broke, stranded passengers, how are we going to feed them? How are we going to feed ourselves, Sir? Never mind that the minute we sit them down, they got no reason not to call the Feds as soon as they hear about the reward.”

“They're here now,” Mal pointed out. “They're on board. What do you want me to do, tell them to take a walk?”

“Maybe just one of them, Sir,” she said, not quite as much joking as not joking.

“And then the other four would all be witnesses to that,” he pointed out.

Zoe had said her piece, and so she walked away. She knew what Mal had just said was true. He'd been wrong, but he was right about it. There was nothing right they could do at this point. Things were in motion that had to be let to 'just happen' themselves out.

But she resented it, resented the way Mal always assumed everyone's lives were his to risk and to protect, that every single choice was his to make and to live with. And she knew that there were others on board who resented it more than she did, who resented _Mal_ and trusted him less, felt less loyal to him because of incidents like this in a way she never could, but which she understood. She also knew her husband, Wash, was one of them. It frustrated her that Mal would never listen, never let a word to the wise be enough to teach him to take a few easy precautions to make other people feel heard and respected, not just cared about the way children and other incompetents are.

****

“Damn it, Mal,” Inara stormed quietly, “You're not hearing what I'm saying. You're not trying to hear what I'm saying! There are plenty of worlds where we both can work. You have to let me work, or this arrangement can't.”

“Threats, is it now?” Mal asked with carefully suppressed heat. “You figure to change how I run my ship be threatening to leave?”

“I didn't mean it like that,” Inara tried to explain, conciliatory, but still frustrated.

“Yeah?” Mal challenged bitterly, “Just exactly how did you mean it?” Inara turned away. There was no arguing with him when he was like this. At times like this in fact, she often wondered why she didn't just leave. She'd never thought much of women who explained staying beholden to men who called them whores and tried to run their lives, to horde them like gorram platinum, with the old standard excuse of 'I love him.' “Well, maybe next time you should just stick to wiles,” Mal was saying as he turned to huff self-righteously away. And in a way, she though, maybe he was right. She should have.

“Beloved of the Goddess!” she heard a smooth, silken, warmly amused voice declare, “Why do you let him speak to you that way? He should be on his knees to worship at your alter, dear priestess!” As the man continued to speak, the amusement in his voice was rapidly being replaced by passion. It was Ethan, the still nearly naked one of the latest basket of stray humans Mal had adopted.

“How did you get in here?” she demanded, much less harshly than she had meant to.

“I'm quiet,” Ethan said with a trying-too-hard-to-be-charming-but-succeeding-anyway kind of smile, clearly amused again.

“If you think you can come here for sex, that you can demand my company in exchange for some trinket...” she started to launch into her standard lecture. She had been told that he was sly, that he was the lover or at least the ex-lover of one of the men he traveled with, but the way he was appraising her, undressing her with his eyes just for beginners, she knew that wasn't the truth, at least not the whole truth.

“Dear lady!” Ethan assured her, sounding genuinely if only slightly wounded, and amused at himself even for that, “Let me assure you, I make no such assumption. I mean, I'd be honored, don't get me wrong. But I think we both know that what you do is a bit more complicated than that.”

“What do you know about my work?” Inara asked. It was her turn to be amused now.

“About your profession,” he replied, “probably even less than I think. About what you are, your role as the vessel of the Goddess in this world, quite a lot, actually.

“Of course, my own religion is a bit more... unorthodox,” he went on more or less mock philosophically (or maybe not so mock?) but I respect your work very, very much. Most of us are on a side, you see, but you, you are the priestess of the Goddess of the Union of Law and Chaos, the One True Mother! I can see her aura all around you, you know.”

“Who is that?” Inara guessed, truly amuse now by what she saw as an nothing more than a stretching exercise in playful flattery, the kind of for fun more than for sex flirting that she also enjoyed and was very good at. “Is it Kali?” she guessed.

“No,” he said, sounding suddenly serious. “You, my dear are the Acolyte of Venus! Kali and all that death crowd...” he went on, amused again, playfully superior, “well, Rupert and his lot... that's more their line.”

****

“Two By Two,” she was only mumbling sleepily now, weeping softly, no longer howling and shrieking in terror. “Two By Two/Hands of Blue. They Come Out of the Bike. They Come When You Call.” River should have been out cold from all the drugs Simon had given her, but she wasn't, and he didn't dare to give her any more. So on she carried, in that eerie, sing-song murmur.

“Two By Two/Hands of Blue. Two By Two, and he is one. Just one, just one and not the other. One hand claps the other, makes it make that sound, but he doesn't mean it. Doesn't wear the gloves. Doesn't need them. Hands already soaked in blood, soaked through the skin and in. Two By Two/Hands that Knew. Same Song. Same Song, Different Verse.”


	7. INSIDE, OUTSIDE, UPSIDE DOWN

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As Buffy's condition appears to remain unchanged, Willow and Amy seek help from someone older and wiser. Ethan parries with Inara over the possibility of a thrust. Oz learns what it means to be a werewolf unfettered by The Moon That Was. The men of Buffy's life discuss plans to get back to her. And familiar people keep turning up in strange places, much to everyone's peril.

Ira was hallucinating; he knew that much. A bright white light filled the darkness within but not the darkness without. He could here a woman singing silently. She sounded like Sheila but she was not Sheila, nor was she Willow. Not entirely. There was... not an image exactly, but the idea of an image. A menorah. But instead of the candles being lighted one by one, one by one they were blinking out.

*****

“Ummm, I think you can come down now,” Oz said awkwardly. “I... feel better.” 'Embarrassed' seemed like an odd emotional response to what he had just done, but that was definitely what he was feeling. Maybe he was in shock, he thought vaguely, maybe to horror of it all would hit him later. 

“I'm fine here, thanks,” said Xander stiffly from where he was still clinging, fingers and heels dug in, to the top to the lamppost. “This is very comfortable really... so...”

“That's not the last of them,” Oz pointed out reasonably, his eyes sweeping the corpse strewn greenery, alert for the appearance of more officers. He counted fourteen dead, most with their throats torn out and several much more badly mauled even than that. Fourteen cops. That was a hanging matter anywhere there was such a thing and a locked-up-forever-with-chance-of-lobotomy matter anywhere else. He couldn't leave Xander sitting in the middle of this like a goat with its horns tangled in the brush. 

But besides Xanders (objectively somewhat reasonable) misgivings about coming down to join him in making his escape, there was also the practical difficulty of how he was even supposed to get down. They still had nothing like a ladder. And time was bound to be of the serious essence. Oz suppressed a groan. Even knowing it was likely to complicated Xander's... trust issue with him, there was only one thing he could see to do. 

Hurriedly, but carefully, positioning them for maximum stability, Oz began piling the corpses one on top of the other at the base of the lamppost. His arms hurt like hell even through the clamber of sensory data that enveloped him, but they seemed to work alright. The casts had broken off during the fight apparently, which he suspected was a very bad thing, but he so didn't have time to worry about that right now. 

“Oh God!” Xander groaned, when he saw what was happening. He squeezed his eyes shut and began mumbling a muddle of confused prayers. 

“Shut up!” Oz snapped, suddenly so cross, so near to being truly angry with the other boy, that it frightened him. “I'm trying to concentrate here!” he snarled. He'd been trying for a firm but slightly apologetic tone, but that wasn't it. Xander was beyond frightened, now, Oz knew. He was terrified. He was sick with dread. Oz hated to be the cause of such fear, hated to be thought of as a monster, especially by someone he knew, and even more especially when there was so much evidence that he really was something to be afraid of. But Xander _did_ shut up. And that made the world, whatever world it was, just a little bit of a better place. 

For the moment, if just barely, Oz was able to think. He let his mind run as the task of stacking the bodies of his slain enemies into a ladder became rote and mechanical. And Run his mind did. It roved the landscape inside and outside his head, pawing and sniffing at the universe, turning it over and looking at it from every possible angle. Trying to find a way back home. To Earth, to Sunnydale, to twentieth century America. The land where you could hang out in a park at night if you wanted to, without fear of heavily armed bands of Government Agents roaming the streets in search of enemies.

*****

On Agent Bender's shout of “Now!”, white hot arcs of power flew from their outstretched weapons. It was only when the monster was down on the ground that they saw the body cradled in his arms. 

“Holy shit!” one green recruit gasped, “I think we killed her.”

“Not a chance,” Bender assured her. “He already sucked her dry. Otherwise she would have showed hot on the scanners.” The young soldier looked at the older girl skeptically for a moment, then shrugged in the face of her superior's certainty. They hauled the stunned vampire into his specially reenforce Transport and Containment Box (TCB) and called a meat wagon for the victim. 

“Alright,” Bender said, all gung ho, pleased with her night's work, “let's get this handsome fella back to The Professor.”

*****

“You're not supposed to be in here,” she said. But she didn't say it in a way that meant leave. He had gone to some trouble to get clean, she saw. It was the least he could do, since he was lying on her bed, uninvited. But it was no easy trick aboard ship, especially in the now somewhat crowded passenger dorm. He was wearing some fairly nondescript clothing that she though might have belonged to Wash, but he seemed to wear it on his own terms. The way he seemed to do everything.

“I'm not supposed to be anywhere anymore,” Ethan pointed out.

Inara smiled, on guard yet relaxed, as if for a battle of wits. A battle in which she felt she could hold her own and that nothing much was at stake. “So I've heard.” 

Ethan's smile said he felt he'd won a point just by getting her into the ring. Inara felt her heart quicken to the chase. It really had been too long. Too long since she'd had a good spar even, never mind actual sex. Which was probably not where this was going, she reminded herself. But still, the not being one hundred percent sure, one way or the other.... She'd forgotten to notice how much she'd missed that, how much fun it could be not to know where things were going, with almost nothing at stake. 

Ethan sensed her thoughts drifting away from from him. And though it was nothing crucial, though he could walk away from her, never have her and not lose any sleep, he didn't want to. She was a sweet that savored back, a feat well worth attempting because it would appreciate being accomplished. But she wasn't going to be seduced today, nor disarmed by the pretense that that wasn't what he was ultimately up to. The lady was a pro, whatever else, more than a match for him. She had to see all his cards on the table, know she held the winning hand, and still want to fold. 

“This is pretty wild country for a companion,” he said. Changing the subject completely. Not confirming or denying what River had said about them, what Hank had foolishly admitted, letting his could-be-ironic tease in that direction be enough for now. 

Her smile returned. Her eyes danced. She wasn't letting him get away with that. “I'm surprised you know that,” she said, “coming from five-hundred years in the past.”

Oldest profession, he thought. But that was the wrong tack. “We had wild country though,” he said. “Almost two dozen hectares in my neighborhood, all with paths and benches, right between the zoo and the tree museum.”

Inara's smile softened just a little. “That sounds like Xenon,” she said.

He shrugged, projecting catlike indifference. “All cities, I suppose,” he said. He made his eyes sad. Inara wasn't buying it, but she wasn't letting on, allowing herself to appear to reserve judgment on his sincerity and not just on what her response should be. She was now almost though still not entirely sure that sex with Ethan was in her power to choose at any moment. He was working just a little too hard at not seeming to work at it. But like everything else, at least at this point, it would have to seem and perhaps to be on on his own terms. Inara was far from sure that she was willing to give him that, even if she ultimately decided that sex with him was what she wanted... or what she was willing to do to get what she needed. 

Still, she didn't see the harm in giving him a little encouragement, just to make things interesting, just to keep events in motion. “Much as I'd love for you to stay and regale me with tales of Earth That Was,” she said with a 'shy-trying-to-be-bold'-but-in-a-clearly-ironic-and-calculated-way-unless-you-desperately-don't-want-it-to-be smile, “I need to give myself a sponge bath. I've gotten terribly sweaty, sitting in this warm, stale, close little Shuttle all alone for weeks on end.”

His own smile was somehow both frank and sly, both impressed and amused. She was teasing him with the idea that she thought him an easy mark, one to be driven mad with arousal like a little school boy by images of her hands moving like a lover's over her own naked flesh, warm soapy water running in glistening rivulets around the mounds of her breasts and down over her thighs. It was the more amusing, the more pleasantly chaffing, the more _arousing_ still, because, despite the strong primary subtext that they both 'knew' it wasn't working, they both also knew that it actually was. 'Well played,' Ethan thought, and might have said aloud. But that would have burst the delicate suspensions of acknowledgment that kept the game going. And he was far from ready for this to end. Especially while she was winning. 

“Anon, then,” he said instead, tipping an imaginary hat to her as he stood and walked to the door. When he had completely exited and partly shut the door, when she had half slid out of her outermost garment, he leaned back in again. She let out a startled breath and hurried to pulled the silken material back around her shoulders, as if genuinely surprised. It was a touch Ethan appreciated, the perfect non-verbal set up for his carefully chosen line. “Just one bit of advice, from 'Earth That Was',” he offered in a voice velvety with the suggestion of dangerous secret knowledge of something as powerful as magic or sex, “Be ware of Hitchhikers.”

Inara waited for the door to close and lock behind him before she smiled.

*****

When Joyce saw the lights coming up the road, her first impulse was to flag them down for a ride, but for a moment, she almost didn't dare. There was something about this place, something about this night. Something she couldn't put her finger on. Something that scared her. Then again, walking along this dark road at night with no idea how to get back to town or where town even was, let alone what town she would be in if she ever got there, was also pretty scary. 

Although... Joyce had heard about things that happened to girls who hitched rides. On the other hand, her odds were probably better with someone she chose to flag down than with someone who, unprompted, chose to stop. Deciding to risk it, Joyce stepped out into the roadway, arm and thumb outstretched. She had to step back much more quickly. The driver sped up rather than slowing down. Joyce fought the urge to curse and scream at the rapidly disappearing vehicle. But really! What kind of a person would practically try to run down an obviously pregnant woman on the side of a desert road at night?

~~~~~

“Where are you, you vicious brat!?!” Katherine raged and howled. She had locked herself in a classroom, but wasps were still coming in, a few at a time, through the ceiling. She was covered in a least a dozen stings, one of which had swollen her left eye nearly shut. “I'll kill you for this,” she railed. “I'll finally be rid of you once and for all!” 

Then, for a moment, it was as if something had been released. For a moment, she thought of Tim, the way they were, here, together when everything fit and worked and made sense. And for a moment, just for a moment, before the rage returned, there was longing. Longing to begin again, not to correct but to appreciate the past for the present it had been. And to be loved. 

But when the rage returned, it was a sick, sorry, impotent thing. A thing that wanted to break, to crush, to kill, but was itself too broken to bother. James raised the gun to his head. The past that had been his seemingly eternal present was gone. All that remained was a hopeless future, one he didn't want. He held the gun to his temple and squeezed the trigger. He felt the body, Katherine's body, fall and shutter with release. But once again, it had been only _her_ suffering that ended. James was still dead, still beyond hope, still unable to be saved. But still not gone. Still trapped.

~~~~~

Amy stiffened in Willow's embrace. They lay in Giles bed, had lain there for hours, trying to get a little sleep, at most dozing. Neither of them was dozing now. “What is it?” Willow asked.

“How should I know?” Amy snapped, her voice startlingly harsh, brittle. She sat up suddenly and jerked away, but just as suddenly she found herself enfolded in Willow's arms again, melting into her embrace. Sobbing. She wept a good long while, then pulled away, wiped her eyes, stood, and got dressed, not saying anything. Willow watched her nervously for a little while, not seeming to find the courage to ask what was wrong again. Besides, what _wasn't_ wrong? 

Turning her face aside, Willow mumbled, “I'm going to go check on Buffy.” Buffy seemed to be making little progress, even in her own context. She had fallen onto her face again, losing the tiny gains she had earlier made towards sitting up, gravity pulling at her faster than she could shift position. Amy came and stood beside Willow, now fully dressed, now perfectly composed. “We should hit the books again,” Willow said.

Amy shook her head. “This is too much for us,” she said grimly. “We should find someone who knows what she's doing.”

~~~~~ 

The shopkeeper looked up confused. “Did you come in through the back?” she asked nervously. She hadn't heard the bells that warned her when the front door was opening. But, then, she knew that she had locked the back. 

Agent Garner pulled back the slide action on her Desert Eagle and shoved it in the other woman's face. “I'll ask the questions,” she said. “I want to know what kind of magic you've been doing?”

Ms. Waddle was quiet for a moment, which was as long as she dared. She could see no way forward but to employ a small measure of honesty. “Nothing more than monitoring what's been done by others,” she assured the young woman. “The first... vortex,” she explained, groping for terms that were comprehensible without being analogized to the point of pure fiction, “the one in which the men were... shifted away, that was something demonic. But this latest... time flow disruption, this is a witches spell. It just isn't mine.” 

There, that was enough truth, enough to give everything she said a feel of authenticity, enough to let her explain the physical phenomena around them in accurate terms that would be shown true to the extent they could be tested by magical or non-magical means. This measure of honesty gave her license to lie with confidence and credibility when the young officer asked, “Who is this witch? Where can I find her?”

“I wish I knew,” Ms. Waddled replied. 

“Ha!” Garner scoffed, “We'll see about that when The Professor gets through questioning you!”

~~~~~

Sheila had driven the invaders from her Condo with the eager assistance of the local authorities, who were tripping over the troops of the new Federal Garrison to be of assistance to a member of the Medical profession, no matter her specialty. She thanked and dismissed them, pretending not to hear their entreaties to take up a position at the local hospital or their 'subtle hints' that refusal would eventually mean being pressganged into National Service. There was no sign of Willow. Sheila was unsurprised. 

The house on Crawford Street was still boarded up, same as ever. That surprised her at first, but she supposed it should not have. The power was not in the house. It was of the House. She should have known better than to reproduce. Some things could only be destroyed, not changed. Most things, in fact, and especially most people. They were what they were. And what Willow was, what she almost would have had to be, was a witch.

*****

“Do you think she's on the level?” Wash asked skeptically, as the five of them huddled together at the table, speaking in low voices. Pretty much everyone gave him a look. “You know what I mean,” he countered. “Do you think her information is accurate, about the Lassiter.” If it was, and especially if it was true about the 'solid buyer' part, they all knew that was a retirement level score. The thought smacked Wash in the heart. Not that Zoe would ever really retire. 

Mal shrugged, responding to wash's question without noticing his subtly changed expression. “I'd bet a lot on it,” he said, “but not my life if I could help it. If she really did get crossed up in her plans to pull a big job like that, I figure she'd be goin' on about it about like she is. Trying to get another bunch of suckers to help her. If not, there's less complicated ways to sucker someone into just letting you go. She'd have tried at least on one of 'em first I expect.”

“So what do we do about it?” Zoe asked reasonably. “Even if we do believe her. We can't pull a job like that with a crowd of tourists on board.”

“Tourists?” Jayne grumbled, “Gorram lunatics is what they are. Crazier 'en she is.” 

“They ain't,” Kaylee argued. “They're just scared to say who they are is all, someone lookin' for 'em maybe, 'an River givin' 'em an out like that, couldn't help themselves, is what I reckon.” 

“That's the comforting thought?” Wash countered, surprising even Jayne by lining up on his side, “that we just picked up four fugitives who're lying to us?”

“We're overrun with fugitives here anyway,” Zoe pointed out, frustrated, but hard to say with who, “What's four more?”

“What do you _want_ me to do?” Mal demanded of the three of them, getting frustrated himself. “We can't run 'em all though the Gorram engine!”

“What about just her?” Jayne asked. Zoe kept her face carefully neutral, but Mal know what she was thinking anyway.

“She's the one with the Gorram job!” Mal pointed out. “Anybody else around here got any leads on how to make a quick fortune or two with the Feds already on our ass at every turn, 'cause I sure as hell don't!”

“That's just great, Mal(!)” Wash fumed, “Meanwhile, what do we do about these four crazy people? Even if we find a decent place to leave them, how do we know they won't sell us out to the Alliance in exchange for a ride to 'Earth'!?!”

“Well, why don't we hand 'em over to our resident expert on crazy?” Jayne suggested, more joking than not. “Let him sort 'em out.”

Mal started to shout something back at him, then he stopped. His mouth snapped shut. Zoe, Kaylee and Wash exchanged a familiar, uneasy look. A look that said they all agreed they could see him actually thinking about it. Thinking about what had been said and what had been meant and how they related but weren't the same as one another. And having some bold new idea because of it. Hatching some scheme he wasn't ready to let them in on yet. Planning something brilliant or crazy or both that he naturally expected them all to stake their lives on without even thinking they deserved to know what it was. After all, he was 'the Captain' and they were all aboard 'his ship.'

*****

Spike maneuvered his little vehicle across town by a long, halting, circuitous route, avoiding the patrols. He was mindful of the time, wary of the approaching sunrise. He had just driven onto the high school campus when he heard the shot. He was still nearer the main building than to the pool complex, by which rout he had meant to make his way back to the Hellmouth with his cargo of blessed virgins. 

Without really knowing why, Spike parked the tiny truck near a back entrance and went to investigate. The moment he stepped inside, something felt different. There was an eerie calm, a waiting hush beyond what could be explained merely by the stillness of being indoors. Far in the distance, he heard the clock tower chime midnight. 

~~~~~

Frustrated, Janice hit the side of her TV again, just a little harder. Her mother sighed, but didn't bother to chastise her again. The picture remained, as ever, stuck. It was perfectly clear, mind, not a bit snowy. Just stuck. Like nothing she had seen before. Captain Kirk stood frozen forever on the verge of demanding of his beautiful enemy why his crew sat frozen forever. Every other station was the same. Finally, Janice decided to ignore it by playing her Nintendo. There was no school, of course, it being Saturday, not that anyone knew what to expect on Monday. Regardless, the idea of going anywhere, of playing outside even, was out of the question. Nobody's mother wanted to let them out of their sight. 

*****

“So what's the plan?” Hank asked earnestly. He looked at each of his three companions in turn, but his eyes lingering especially, desperately, on Ethan. “How are we getting back to Earth?” They were all gathered around the small metal table in his tiny room in the passenger dorm, at his request.

“Don't you mean 'Earth That Was'?” Ethan asked sardonically. 

“You'll excuse me if I don't find that terribly funny,” Rupert snapped at him, sounding vicious and stiff at the same time. Exactly like his father, Ethan thought. Except that, in this case, Andrew seemed very much amused, if bitterly so.

“It's still there,” Hank insisted stubbornly. “You said so yourself,” he pleaded with Ethan. “We just have to find a way back, and when we get there, then we can find whoever... or whatever—” 

“ _When_ we get there indeed!” Andrew interrupted with a cruel chuckle, “That's the rub, isn't it! Putting aside all practical obstacles, it does still take 70 years to travel 70 lightyears, you know. You'll forgive me, I hope, for pointing out that there are no spring chickens among us, and so, we don't quite have 70 years to spare! Never mind that 70 years for now will be 600 years after the event in question, assuming it even happened on that end, and if not, Earth is hardly the place to start looking for answers in any case! Not that we have the slightest idea of any place that might be better!”

“But we came here in an instant!” Hank insisted hotly. “That means there's got to be a way—there's got—If it works one way, it has to work the other way too! We jus—” 

“Don't be silly,” Ethan purred. “People travel forward through time all day every day—at varying rates of speed by the way, if you believe Einstein at all. I've never yet met one who's come back the other way, and I've met some interesting people, believe you me!”

“Look,” Rupert started in in that trying-to-fashion-calm-from-insistent-rationality tone that Ethan had used to mistake for intelligent, cool and commanding and therefore to find irresistibly appealing. “Father's right!”

“I may die of shock,” Andrew mumbled, taking a drink from a flask that he quickly tucked back into his inside coat pocket.

“ _In that_ ,” Rupert continued, giving the old gentleman a look of supreme disdain, “our only practicable course of action is to start looking for the cause—or at least the solution to this predicament—in the here and now.”

“I don't recall suggesting that we had any practicable course of action,” Andrew replied with a grim smile. “In deed, Occam's Razor would suggest,” he began to lecture pompously, “given the fact that none of us is likely to know or to be known by anyone in this little corner of spacetime, whomever did this to us, by whatever means, lived and likely died on Earth hundreds of years ago. Rare is even the demon of the terrestrial variety that could count on living so long, especially without a thriving human population to live off of one way or another. In deed, the whole point might well have been to send us so far into the future that we'd never cross paths with the perpetrator again and to thereby avoid the karmic price of killing us while gaining the same practical effect. Which would explain why we arrived at a time and place in which we could be found and brought back into the flow of human events, allowing supervening causes to bear the spiritual brunt of our eventual, inevitable deaths.”

“Nevertheless,” Rupert replied thinly, “the place we must look for an answer (whether mystical or technological) is _here, now,_ within the compass of this 'verse' as they call it. First, we must learn as much as we can, as quickly as possible, from the people aboard this ship and the information to which they have access. Then, we need to find a place to establish ourselves more permanently, somewhere where we can have access to adequate research facilities, to learn what sources of power might be—” 

“Whoa, slow down there!” Hank objected. “Or should I say, speed up. We don't have time to put down roots and look for research facilities. Joyce is still missing, and now so are we. Which means Buffy is going to get arrested any day!” Ethan and Andrew shared an uneasy look, while Rupert had an acutely anguished expression all to himself. Heedless, Hank continued to rant, “And even if she doesn't; she is alone, and _pregnant,_ and... and, you know, she's never been the best at making decisions on her own! God knows what kind of trouble she'll get her self into by the time we—!”

Finally, Rupert couldn't stand it anymore. “BUFFY'S DEAD!!!” he shouted, standing up so abruptly that he knocked over the glasses on the tiny, bolted down table and sent his spindly folding chair clattering to the floor. For a moment, Hank was too shocked to speak and the others too apprehensive of the imminent threat of violence. Rupert spoke into the silence he had created in a hushed, heavy voice that struggled to be calm. “Buffy has been dead for centuries,” he all but whispered, pinning Hank with his eyes. “or she is waiting for us as though we had never left. It all depends upon how we open the box. As this is without a doubt the most important thing that either of us will ever do, I suggest we take our time and try to get it right.”

*****

Willow stared gloomily, worriedly at the closed sign on the door of the Magic Box. Amy crossed her arms and rolled her eyes. “She lives upstairs,” she pointed out, stepping up to the door and knocking. But when knocking progressed to banging, and still continued far too long with no response from within, she too began to worry. Ms. Waddle, the proprietor of the Magic Box was, to her knowledge, the only practicing witch (of the human and more or less approachable variety anyway) in all of Sunnydale. Katherine had always spoken of Ms. Waddle disparagingly as a 'goody two shoes', which Amy took as a powerful and positive endorsement of her character. Besides, her aura simply stank of power. If there was anyone in the Godforsaken town who could help...

“You there!” The Day Patrol Officer demanded, coming around the corner. “What's all this racket about?”

“Nothing Officer,” Amy assured her hurriedly, “We were just moving along.”

~~~~~

Seeing no other choice, Joyce continued walking in the direction that the car had gone, on the very shaky theory that there must be _something_ in that direction. But something was wrong. She had been certain that she was headed west and all but certain that the night was young. And yet, in the distance ahead of her, day began to dawn. The brightness towards which she walked contrasted sharply with the starry night around and behind her. Oddly, it didn't seem quite flush with the horizon somehow.

She must be more disoriented than she thought, Joyce decided. It didn't matter, she told herself. She kept moving. No direction but forward. One foot in front of the other, smiling as she remembered one of her mother's favorite (warning) statements: 'When you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there.'

*****

Wash sat on the bridge looking out at the stars. He didn't want to think of that other night, when Saffron (or whoever she was) had watched the stars with him. He didn't want to, but he couldn't help it. He was agitated. Of course, the fact that he was sharing a tiny spaceship in the dead ass center of nowhere with everyone he cared about, an evil mechanical genius who had already tried to kill them all once, two fed-magnet fugitives, and four way too mysterious strangers (some or all of the above being clinically insane) should have been enough to explain any level of agitation. Yeah, it was enough. But it wasn't all, and he knew it. 

He could say whatever he wanted about it. Even if there had been a video of the whole thing (which there wasn't) he had been Ceaser's wife. He had behaved himself. No poison kisses for Wash, no sirree. The rogue companion from hell had had to cold cock him the old fashioned way. And Zoe, his knight in shining leather pants, had been there to rescue and reward him. But for a moment (and it _was_ only for a moment) he had wished she wasn't. She didn't know it, but he did. And even though it had only been a moment, in that moment, he had wished away the one thing in life he was sure about, the one thing in life that mattered. And thinking of life without her, even for a moment, had shown him how empty, how pointless, how utterly without direction, without an 'end of the tunnel' his life (even his life with her) already was. 

And now Zoe was talking about having a baby again, acting like he was rejecting her, like he was saying something about their marriage every time he pointed out how unfair it would be to put a helpless little kid in the fix that they were already in. Every time he didn't say what she knew he was thinking anyway. That it was time to bail. Time to find another boat to drive while they still weren't the ones the Feds were specifically looking for. 

Of course, she saw it too. How could she not see it. Even if, by some miracle, Mal managed to get disentangled from the Tams without anyone getting killed over it one way or the other, it wasn't like he was ever going to stop looking for trouble or it was ever going to stop finding him. 

But Zoe would never leave Mal. They both knew it, despite the big show she'd made of choosing him over Mal when push came to shove with Niska. That was what she was really saying when she said 'not now' wasn't an answer. She didn't look for there to be a someday. There was never going to be a 'home'. This was the life she had chosen, not for now but for good and all. Wherever Malcolm Reynolds was, there would Zoe be also, for better or for wore, for rich or for poor, in sickness and in health until death parted them. It didn't really matter that Zoe hadn't fucked Mal or that she never even wanted to, any more than it would matter if she had. They were what his people (or his mother's people anyway) would have called 'sealed', joined at the soul. And her 'husband' could like it, lump it, or leave her behind, but he could never come between them. 

Husband wasn't really even the word for it, Wash ruminated morosely. That would mean she belonged to him or they belonged to each other, or something. The truth was, he was her concubine. Because even if she wasn't his, he was definitely hers. He had been hers from the first minute he'd laid eyes on her. She was the only reason he'd ever set foot on this gorram ship in the first place. She was the only reason he was still here now. Living his life for a woman who lived her life for someone else. And now she was giving him shit for shirking a concubines second principal duty. And every new approach to the topic felt like a repetition of the same unacceptable answer to the question that had plagued him since that night on the bridge with Saffron. 'Where is any of this going?'

“Any road will take you there,” River nearly sang. She was standing at his elbow, having walked up, quiet as a cat, while he was lost in thought.

“You're not supposed to be on the bridge,” he reminded her harshly, his voice sounding childishly petulant in his own ears. 

River only smiled her knowing little smile. “It's okay,” she said. “Not like I'm going to try to tell you myths and fairytale or anything.”

*****

Clouds obscured the moon and stars in the desert night. The old man was near tears of confusion, but one of the boys took him by the hand and whispered words of encouragement, of reassurance, in a language he didn't understand. The words didn't matter. The message was clear enough. _This_ way was South. To Mexico. Home for some of their party, a strange land to others. But for all of them, the land of freedom. 

He drank of the boys' confidence and pressed onward. In Mexico, men and boys were being tagged and released. A woman on the radio had said so.

 


	8. Priority Check

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everyone struggles with issues like "When the hell are we?", "Where do we go from here?" and "Who's on top of what (or whom)?"

 

“...the fuck!?!” Spike hissed. It was damn near broad morning! At least... it had been. He had practically raced the bloody sun here! And Yet. Though he could see well enough through undead eyes, the interior of the school was dark, not merely dim. Pools of light like the one around the (always lit) trophy case were isolated, bounded, like a candle's glow. By darkness. 

It seemed to seep in through every window. As if it were a positive thing in its own right. As the sound of the midnight bell faded to a distant echo and was gone, the silent dark proclaimed its affirmation of the truth that the bell had spoken. It was midnight. Twelve a.m. On what was only just becoming the seventh day of March, in the year of someone's Lord nineteen and ninety-eight. 

Time seemed to have skipped briefly backward and then begin moving forward again, like a slightly scratched CD. And like a scratched CD, Spike realized, he didn't know if he could completely trust it not to skip again at another spot. He needed to get underground, and quickly, before the sun popped out at him unexpectedly from around some hidden corner of the space-time continuum. Then and only then could he expend time (or something like it) and energy in figuring out what the Hell was going on. 

But suddenly, Spike didn't dare make the sprint to the pool complex that he had intended to make _knowing_ the sun was about to rise, but also knowing how fast. He'd make his way to the basement, Spike deiced. That would be a safe place to think. For that matter, there might even be a hidden passage down there that he had yet to discover, a way into the bowels of the town, perhaps, if not into the sacred place itself. 

But someone must have read his mind or his (arguably) future or something. Someone who was actually pretty used to that sort of thing. Because there she was, her pale skin and velvet gown caked with dirt, a filthy pick ax in her hand, a mop of sweaty, filthy dark hair hanging in clumps and tangles around her face, as she must have looked the day she arose, reborn, the devil's own. 

“Drusilla!” Spike breathed, and the word became a little prayer of homage. “You... came for me! You made a way for my salvation! Oh, Dru,” he moaned, as in the grip of sudden revelation, crossing to her as her heavy tool dropped to the floor. “You're the one, the only one, I... To Hell with Angel!” he all but snarled, grabbing her fiercely by both arms. “We don't need him or any of the rest of them! Let's get out of Sunnydale tonight, you and me! You're the only one I care about! The only one who understands me, the only one I can...” his voice broke with emotion. Honestly near tears, he willed her, just this once, to see the truth: that they and only they belonged together, that nothing and no one else mattered! 

But something was wrong. Something more complicated than her inevitable rejection of the idea of ditching Angel. Drusilla tilted her head just a little and gave him a strange, slightly sad, _very human_ , look. “Oh, James,” she said, “I understand, believe me I understand. But it's over.”

'Who the fuck is James?' Spike opened his mouth to ask, but instead he found himself demanding, with a harsh laugh, “Over!?! Do you honestly think this can ever be _over_! You can't make me disappear just because you say it's 'over'!!!”

“There's no way!” the bitch wailed back at him, trying to plow under the wall of his righteous anger with her martyrous, self-indulgent grief. “No way we can ever be together. No way people will ever understand. Accept it!”

James had only thought he'd been pissed off until she'd said that. _“IS_ _ **THAT**_ _WHAT THIS IS ABOUT!?!?”_ he screamed at her, going nearly apoplectic,stooping to grab the pickax that lay on the floor between them, brandishing it high in his right hand as he closed on her, _“WHAT OTHER PEOPLE_ _ **THINK!!!!!**_ _”_

_ ~~~~~ _

“I looks like the world is frozen in time,” Ms. Waddle explained nervously, hurriedly, not for the first time, though it had taken some pretty rough persuasion to get her beyond the pat little song of uncertainty she had been chirping at first, “But it's not. It's us. The whole town, in fact. We are moving through time very rapidly relative to the rest of the universe.” 

The anti-magical restraints still chafed her wrists and ankles, but at least she had been allowed to put her clothes back on before being dragged before The Professor herself, though she suspected this was as much to hide the unseemliness of her battered body as anything else. “It's that new witch,” she repeated desperately for the benefit of this stone-faced, lab-coated little Lordling, “Willow Rosenberg. She lives with her mother in those big condos off Wilmont Street, or she used to, anyway. 

"The spell was cast from somewhere else in town though. I honestly don't know where because I wasn't expecting to have to know, and I can't check without doing magic. The main reason I know it's her is because it's too powerful a spell for any other so called witches in this town and— oh, now there's a thought, you could try checking the Levine House. You can't miss it, really. It's that huge mansion, right at the end of Crawford Street! I could take you there!” she wheedled desperately, “Please!”

The Professor seemed thoughtful for a moment. Ms. Waddle dared to hope against hope that the woman was considering her suggestion. If she could just get to a place where the balance of power was more in her favor, where the mystical forces outweighed the mundane physical ones and the restraining cuffs would be relatively weakened.... “Oh,” said Professor Walsh, rousing from her thoughts for just a moment, just long enough to spare a single glance at the broken witch. “Agent, put her in a containment cell until we know for sure if we're going to need her for anything else.”

~~~~~

“ _Sheila... Sheila,” the ghostly voice whispered. “Sheila, I need you!”_ Dr. Rosenberg sat bolt upright in bed. For a moment she expected to find Ira there in the room with her. Sunday morning was dawning outside their window, a morning they could have spent wrapped up in one an other's arms as had once been their custom, long ago. 

She felt the sense that a part of him was there, in fact, that he needed her help. But the voice she remembered from her vague, auditory dream was a woman's voice. If not her mother's voice then... one like it. Besides, other memories told her that Ira was beyond her help and that she had spent her last happy morning in his arms. She was a widow in a widowed world. Dr. Rosenberg was dead. And her top priority right now had to be to find and confront Willow.

~~~~~

“Oh!My!Goddess!” Willow cried as her head fell back against Giles's pillow. Amy giggled into her cunt, but didn't let up, not even for the chance to say the very clever line she'd just thought of in response, 'No one's ever called me that before!' She pressed on, licking and kissing and tonguing and very slightly nibbling, driving Willow to yet another orgasm. 

It was her dirty little secret that she thought it probably really was better to give than to receive, especially if Willow didn't know she thought so. Everyday, the increasing imbalance in orgasms put Willow (and especially Willard) ever more in her debt. Which was sort of a delicious feeling.

Amy wasn't used to being in a position of strength. Relative to anyone really. But it seemed like something she could get used to pretty fast. So it surprised her a little, and bothered her something like a lot when, as they lay gasping in each other's arms, Willow sighed, “I think you should have to be the guy this time. I like getting fucked as much as you do, you know.”

“It's too dangerous,” Amy suggested quickly. “With men being rounded up...” It was a thoughtless tactical blunder.

Willow sat bolt upright and gave Amy a look. “It's too dangerous for you but not for me?” she asked, angry-hurt.

“That's... not what I meant,” Amy managed, though she was more than a little hard put to say what she  _had_  actually meant. “Look, you can do a glamour in a heartbeat,” she pointed out defensively, changing tack instead of explaining. “If I was a guy... I wouldn't have the power to hide it when it mattered or to change back fast enough, and you know it!”

Willow looked Amy firmly, appraisingly in the eye. She was bullshitting, grasping at straws to excuse the fact that she wasn't willing to do what Willow was doing (sometimes twice a day) for her. But she wasn't lying about the power thing. Willow hadn't really realized it until just that very moment, how far the student had surpassed the teacher in almost every way. And how much Amy clearly resented it. 

Suddenly, Willow was in no mood to fuck or to be fucked. “We shouldn't be wasting the whole day in bed anyway,” she pointed out. “We need to get back to work. We have to find a way to help Buffy.” But she didn't say, 'and Oz.'

_*****_

The practical strategizing part of the meeting didn't last long. Hank remained quietly in shock, doing a lot of nodding as Giles described, in general terms, how they should go about frankly but politely inquiring of the crew as to the overall lay of the land where they might find a home, without making any further outlandish claims about their origins or calling any more attention to the claims that had already been made. Which made Hank easily the second most active participant in the meeting. 

Andrew's participation was limited to the occasional sarcastic comment or derisive snort, all between sips from his flask. Ethan stretched out on the empty bunk opposite the one Hank sat on, yawning with abandon. “Well, that was a stimulating hour,” Ethan declared at last, though it hadn't been nearly that. Languidly oozing to his feet he added, with an ostentatious show of indifference, which Giles knew was being made mostly to exasperate him, “but I think I'll go and see if I can find myself something to eat on this tub.” Without another word, he swaggered out the door, leaving Hank looking stricken and Andrew (as ever) disdainful. 

Even knowing Ethan's motives, Giles _was_ exasperated, very much so. Because the bastard was not entirely _faking_ his lack of concern for whether they ever saw Merry Old Sol again, just rubbing it in his 'old friend's' face. Well, and obviously exaggerating it a little for maximal effect.

Even Ethan was bound to be unsettled, to feel some sense of vulnerability and apprehension, upon finding himself in a strange new world without a penny or a compass. But to his way of thinking (if you'd even call it that) these inconveniences were certain to be largely balanced by the fact that what was happening to them was unusual, uncontrolled and therefore just plain interesting. This, after all, was the same person who, as a relative innocent of seventeen, had once answered his exhortations to help break the locks that confined them to the torture chamber of a cannibalistic sorcerer with, 'You go if you want; I'm not done looking around yet.' 

“There's probably not a lot more we can accomplish until we've learned a little more about who's who and what's what,” Giles told Hank, half apologetically. “In fact, I suggest you try and get some rest, if you can. We've got our work cut out for us.” 

For a moment Hank stood with his mouth open and one hand partly raised, as though he were about to object. Then he close his mouth, nodded once, eyes downcast and lay back on his bunk, staring at the very low ceiling. “Yeah,” he agreed with an odd little smile. “We might as well call it a night.”

Andrew stood and waited while his son maneuver awkwardly around the table and two chairs that filled the narrow space between the bunks. Each cabin in the tiny passenger dorm was evidently designed for double occupancy, but only just. Andrew, for one, was grateful for the small mercy fate had shown them in the fact that the ship was not so full as to require them to double up. Of course, he had damn little else to be grateful for at this point. But not being forced to share the runtish bother of a monastic cell with Rupert was really quite a blessing when you thought about it carefully. Still, he followed his son back to his 'bunk'.

“Did you want something?” Rupert asked shortly, when he had stooped in the open doorway to his tiny quarters and it was evident that his father meant to follow him in.

“A word,” Andrew said just as shortly, casting an eye about to be certain they were not being observed, by Ethan Rayne particularly. 

“Make it a quick one,” Rupert advised, walking to his bunk and sitting down. “I'm bloody exhausted. And I could frankly use some solitude to... adjust to things.”

Andrew nodded vaguely and closed the door. “I won't bother pointing out,” he said grimly, “how unseemly it is that you've so clearly if tacitly admitted to fornicating with your Slayer—” 

“Oh for God's sake,” Rupert groaned indignantly. “In the first place, even _you_ don't call it that unless you're _trying_ to be a stiff old codger! And in the second... Unseemly? Honestly? To whom?” he demanded. “I mean, do you truly believe that the Council has actually _survived_ the destruction of the entire planet?”

“When Rome fell, we carried on,” Andrew answered grimly, helping himself to a seat on the spare bunk, just as if he'd been invited. Because, in all courtesy, he should have been. “Or do you think the mystical forces surrounding the Chosen One are bound to a damp, dusty ball of iron?” 

Rupert actually looked offended at that! As though someone had insulted his mother! The thought stopped Andrew in mid-sneer. Familiar horrors and regrets jumped at him from the shadows of his suddenly ancient past, sobering and chastening him just a little. You'd have though that the realization that she should have been long dead by now in any case might have blunted the edge of memory a bit, but it didn't. 

Andrew's hand shook just a little as he reached into his coat pocket for his much too light flask. He was going to have to find a means of refilling it, and soon. But first, he had to make his position clear to Rupert, to plant the seeds of reason that would hopefully take root as he calmed and reflected. “Our first priority should be to find the Council and report,” he advised his son quietly, “Regardless of the mechanism, fate has brought us here, and so it stands to reason that we may be needed very urgently in some way we do not yet understand.”

Rupert snorted his contempt. “You're mad!” he scoffed bitterly. The fire flashing in his green eyes sent a chill up Andrew's spine. “It might just as easily be reasoned that fate, like whoever or whatever has _intentionally_ sent us hence, merely requires us out of the way! Everything about our destiny has always had everything to do with the Slayer's destiny after all, not with anything else!”

The chill Andrew deeply resented, but the fire... that he bitterly understood. He spent a moment looking down at the flask in his hands, fiddling with the cap as an excuse to look away from those eyes. “My God!” he choked out at last, “Spare us all! You're in _love_ with her!”

Rupert lay back and looked up at the ceiling. “It does happen to some of us, you know,” he said sardonically. He sounded both slightly embarrassed and deeply annoyed. In other words, very much like young Rupert of old. “Look,” he added agitatedly, turning on his side (for the first time it occurred to Andrew that on, up, down, etc. had strikingly consistent values, given the context) “could we... argue about this later. I don't feel like discussing it just now.”

Andrew cursed quietly, more angry at the universe in general than at Rupert. He pushed hard at an ugly recollection and found that he was shoving himself up and off the bunk upon which he sat. He knew well enough now that it was no use holding his breath for his son to clam and reflect. He remembered very well the sudden and sustained shock of realizing that one is still desperately in love with a girl who is stone dead. In fact, remember hardly seemed the word. But he couldn't let his regrets take control of him again just now. “My goal is to find the Council,” he told his son firmly, before opening the door. “You'll have to sort out for yourself, I suppose, what your priorities are.”

~~~~~

“Are you sure you're alright?” Xander asked Oz nervously, for at least the fifteenth time. 

“No!” Oz hissed finally, exhausted, exasperated. “I am not alright. _We_ are not alright. We are squatting under a bridge in a fascist city where homeless people apparently actually have ID or had better have, less than a mile from the pile of dead cops who's blood we can't get to wash out of our clothes, and your grafts are seeping something that smells greener than an F-sharp bell, even from over here!”

“I meant your arms, actually,” Xander half apologized, still sounding way too close to cheerful for Oz's taste. “But hey, it's good to know that oratory class is paying off for ya. I think that's the most words I've ever heard you say all at once like that.”

Oz just glared at him for a moment. “They're fine,” he fell back to repeating, and this time he relented and explained. “Apparently, it's part of the whole werewolves in space thing, crazy healing powers.”

“Oh,” was all Xander managed to say. Because, of course, the idea could not keep from popping into his head that with his three still splinted fingers on his right hand and the skin grafts on his back not loving his rapid 'resumption of vigorous activities' he could really use some monster healing power right about now. But he wasn't about to say anything like that. At least not yet. And, thankfully, neither was Oz.

“The first thing we have to do is find a way to get clean and change clothes,” Oz mused aloud, still acting, in Xander's humble opinion, very un-Oz. “If we can walk down the street without automatically drawing attention, that might cut down on the getting carded and give us time to figure something else out." 

“But shouldn't we be working on... getting back to Earth?” Xander asked, feeling a dizzying sense of unreality even saying it. 

Oz gave him another one of those I'm-being-cool-about-the-fact-that-you're-a-moron looks he'd seen so many of in the last few hours. “If we live long enough to think of something to try,” he said, in his familiar calm, even, could-be-ironic-but-won't-commit-to-it voice, “Then we'll try it.” He got decisively to his feet, “right now,” he said, “we need to sniff out a nobody's-home to burglarize.” 

~~~~~

“How did you get in here?” Bridget gasped breathily. 

She sat up in bed hugging her thin sheet to her chest so that it formed a narrow triangular drape between her already nightgown covered breasts, almost giving one the impression that he was seeing them exposed, seeing her exposed. Vulnerable. Overall, she looked innocent and terrified. 

Though Ethan knew better... yet and still... it was convincing. It was like watching a film and seeing with your own eyes sex and death that had never happened. Ethan could have laughed. Instead, he silently warned himself to watch his step. Aloud he said, “A good magician never tells his secrets.”

The Lady smiles to herself, but only in her own mind. The rutting fool is being ostentatiously cavalier, speaking in that oily, deliberately amused way of his. He is spreading his 'cynicism' and the 'delight' he pretends to take in it before her face like a baboons red ass cheeks, begging her to screw him. 

He is as cynical, as indifferent as a chubby cheeked little hick kid at a two wagon carnival with one _real_ elephant. He will be as easy to take for what he has worth taking. He will thank her. He will gawp, wide-eyed at the 'wonders' he has been shown for his fist full of grubby coins and beg to be taken again. He thinks that life holds mysteries.

“What do you want?” she asked. The tiny quaver in her voice was a nice touch, Ethan thought. But he wasn't going to play this game much longer. It didn't suit him. 

“To rescue you, of course,” he said, his tone lightly mocking, “damsel that you are(!)”

“But... we're in deep space,” she projected worry and confusion at him, still not giving up the pose. 

“So it would seem,” Ethan agreed, nearly yawning the words. “Is that a problem for a woman of your... talents?”

Innocent is the wrong tack with this one. He wants to out cynic a cynic. He knows her shipboard reputation after all. From Mal and probably others. 

The Lady allows herself an exasperated sigh as she lets the pose drop. She shows him the 'real' frustrated, angry pirate underneath. She curses in Chinese, but it confuses the stupid fucker. She curses some more, in half a dozen dead languages from Korean to Portuguese that can only be learned from recordings. Not that there is one chance in a million hells that he will understand a word of it, but, well... after all... showing some frustration is nothing against her purpose here. 

“Alright you stupid gorram bastard son of Satan's oldest whore!” she seethes in English at last. “Quit humping around the bush and tell me what you have in mind!”

Ethan smiled. He had broken her pose easily, but then she had so little invested in it. A scrap of song flitted through his head, '♫... _and she never gives in; she just changes her mind_...♪' Still, he let himself appear cocky, as if he mistook the small point he had won for a major victory. Well, and his swagger was not altogether fake at that. He _had_ scored a small point on her; she could hardly say the same. In fact, he suddenly wondered how far he could push the let-her-think-she-is-letting-me-think-I'm-winning game. 

The first round of his long slow spar with Inara, delicious as it was on an intellectual level, had left in his body a diffuse but unpleasant sensation of unfulfilled anticipation. He wondered if this one, whatever her name was, would do him the favor of relieving his tension in the name of wrapping him around her finger (wasn't that a nice image) or lulling him into a false sense of security. 

Of course, sex was not what he had come here seeking. But he could see no way in which it was incompatible with his more important plans. A subquest, then! A pleasant diversion. 

To that end, he decided to try the trick he thought she was least likely to expect. It was a maneuver he had learned from a Vampire he had had to stay with for a few days (long story) the last time he was in Haiti. He decided to ring her doorbell and ask if he could come in. 

“I want you to be my Christmas present,” he says. The Lady is not surprised by what he wants of course, but by the way he says it. Is that some kind of conventional fucking euphemism wherever the hell he really comes from? The look and tone with which he begins to explain tell the Lady that he's aware of having bemused her for a moment, and that he feels a slight sense of triumph about it. 

She swallows her childish resentment. It is a good, from her perspective, that he should feel triumphant. She realizes with a mixture of annoyance and amused contempt that she'll be getting him off soon. And probably in the most unimaginative way possible, the way the birds and the bees and the flees do it. 

She is bored and trying not to be. Boredom is a dangerous state. A near occasion of sloppiness. She makes herself listen attentively.

“Aboard this ship,” Ethan explained, amused at the cleverness of his own conceit, “I find myself … pressed between a disagreeable past and an... uncertain future. I want to 'come in my own time'.” She seemed annoyed, though she was trying not to show it. Suddenly he felt a little less clever, wondering if she had any clue what he was referring to. 

Seeing no better way forward, he pressed on, getting quickly to the what that was in it for her. “Dear Lady!” he declared, his entreaty only slightly tinged with irony, “I dare to suggest that you would find my embrace rather... liberating?”

The Lady's lip curls into something between a grin and a snarl. Whatever this idiot is blathering about, the thrust of his argument (so to speak) is obvious enough. She shouldn't give in too easily she decides. He wants to defeat her and it is entirely to her advantage to have been defeated. 

“Shove a planet up your fuckhole, you walking pile of ass hair shavings!” she shouts at him (in English since he's apparently linguistically retarded or something) letting the resentment of someone who hates the fear and weakness she is feeling edge her voice. For a moment she can feel his uncertainty, his guilt. 

He blusters through a witty, suggestive comeback, but he has lost his footing a little. He likes the idea of besting her, of making the attainment of sex a victory against her; but not the thought of forcing himself on an unwilling woman. He contradicts himself like most dumb fuckers do. 

He wants to make her want him, but letting him think he's really won that is nothing to her peruse. Besides, it will take longer than either of them wants to spend. She just has to make him feel enough better about her worthiness as a competitor, that she's as good a player but he has better cards. Then she can reel him in and obligate him. If she manages to leave a little hook of guilt in the back of his mind for 'taking advantage of her', that's just a bonus, another useful tool for controlling him later, not that she couldn't anyway. 

She backs off of the negativity. She emphasizes her stuckness and asks about his obviously inability to do anything directly about it in such a way as to help him argue the contrary without being too obvious. She lets him sit on the bed while they talk, as though she is doing him a favor already.

“Alright,” said Bridget finally, a wry smile playing at the edges of her lips, “I'll be your pretty pink package to open. On three conditions.”

“Isn't one the going rate?” Ethan drawled, trying to sound bored and superior. 

Bridget laughed. “It's a sellers market,” she said. “Besides,” she added, suddenly leaning close, one hand on his infuriatingly clothed shoulder, lips so near his ear that it was a crime not to touch him, but she didn't, “I'm that good.” 

With a start, Ethan realized that his heart was pounding, his palms were sweating, and he was hanging on her every word in a tragicomic state of aroused anticipation. Mild resentment and self-censure mingled with artistic appreciation and naked desire. She really was that good!

“Alright,” he agreed, acknowledging her superior worth with a little nod of glorious defeat, “Name your price.” 

~~~~

“Get the fuck inside!” the Transporting Officer snarled, poking his prisoner in the back. “Hey!” he yelled to the Duty Guard, “We got another non-doc! It's like there's a gorram convention in town or something.” Then the smirking asshole, jerked Snyder forward by one of the completely unbeltlike loops that protruded at several points from the approximate waistline of his shapeless, incredibly oversized, white jumpsuit. 

It took every ounce of restraint Snyder had to bite his tongue and keep his head down through this ongoing storm of indignities, indignities which had already included both a strip search and a very public 'decontamination'. That didn't even take into account the fact itself of being mistaken for some kind of illegal or criminal or whatever it was these oddly dressed, highly technologically equipped Federal Agents seemed to think he was. Which was humiliation enough.

Now the great, crewcutted beast of an officer who had brought him in was shoving him down a narrow hallway and manhandling him through a door, though he had offered no resistance stiffer than a look of hostile apprehension. The larger man pushed Snyder hard from behind, dumping him unceremoniously onto the concrete floor of a cell and slamming the door. 

Snyder did growl then, and curse under his breath, just a little. As his eyes began to adjust to the near total darkness, he realized, as he might have suspected, that he was not alone. “Who is that?” a familiar, not-all-that-terribly masculine voice called quietly, startled, afraid. 

“R.C. Snyder,” he informed his distant cousin grudgingly. Allen, of course it would be Allen, moved towards him, a vague shape in the dark. 

Snyder was embarrassed that this of all men should witness him brought to such a low condition, but then, at least Fench didn't seem to be doing any better. And, after all, things could have been worse. Someone more important could have been here to see them both so disgraced as to blemish the collective honor of the Greater Wilkins Clan. 

There was a yawn and another, much sleepier voice. Oh God, that voice! “Come back to bed, Allen,” the Mayor mumble-whine-scolded, still more asleep than awake. Then, His voice went suddenly cool, suddenly taunt. “Who's there?” he demanded.

“N-no one, sir,” Allen stammered, “J-just R.C.”

“I apologize...” Snyder had almost said for intruding, but even that was too much to say so he let the sentence die, ducking his head, even in the dark. 

There was a small amount of thin, oblique light making it's way into the tiny room from somewhere. Enough to reveal that there were two bunks protruding from each of two walls and therefore no overriding necessity for the two men to be sharing one. Of course everyone _ knew _ ... well within reason everyone knew.... But that didn't mean Snyder wanted to know about it, and he knew no good would come of the Mayor realizing that he did. 

“Well Gosh,” Wilkins said, suddenly wrapping himself in a warm, cheerful tone that sent a chill down Snyder's spine. He chuckled. “Isn't this pickle, we're all in.” 

As his eyes adjusted further, Snyder realized (to his mingled relief and apprehension) that, in fact, each of the other bunks was filled with an inert or only slightly shifting mass that might have been a man or two. He had been wrong in assuming that no more than two to four persons would be lodged in such a small cell. It was enough to allow the supposition to be maintained that he might have been wrong about... that other circumstance. 

“Who's all?” Snyder asked nervously, addressing Allen more than presuming to address the Mayor himself. And true to form, it was Allen who answered. It was the type of menial, factual question that was generally presumed to be his to answer for the Mayor anyway. 

“Ron's here,” Allen explained, indicating the top bunk opposite the door, above the one he and the Mayor were sharing. “And Bob,” still nodding at the same bunk. Well, the Sheriff and Police Chief had been sharing tents and such since they were cub scouts, so that made sense. “Garrett Chase,” Allen went on indicating the higher of the two bunks to Snyder's left with a slight, nervous laugh. “Mark Engels,” indicting the lower bunk, still sounding very pained. “And Dr. Richard Kendall,” he concluded, his voice rising and trembling slightly, indicating a man lying on the floor beneath the lower bunk. 

Allen was putting an unseemly if unintentional fine point on the fact that he knew, that  _ everyone _ knew, why Snyder could not possibly be pleased to find himself sharing a cell with Harmony's father, the Prosecuting Attorney, and the President of the School Board. Snyder bit his tongue to keep from cursing again, knowing the now fully alert Mayor would not appreciate it. 

Snyder wasn't the only one displeased with what Allen had to say. Two or three men groaned in annoyance. “Can't we can the introductions?” Engels pleaded on behalf of the groaning faction. “I just got to sleep. Besides, we all know each other, anyway. Let's just get some sleep.”

“For now,” the Mayor agreed, closing all debate. “For now, we should sleep.”

Snyder swallowed his useless frustration. He didn't bother pointing out that he had no place to sleep. He wasn't about to climb into a bunk with any of these men, even if they had offered. Besides, sleeping was the last thing anyone ought to be doing at a time like this. 

They should have been talking; comparing what they knew, figuring out what was really going on, what 'transgression' had brought them here, and what the rules were for getting out. Wherever you were, there were always rules. If you wanted to ever have anything other than trouble, the first two things you had to do were learn the rules and follow them.


	9. That Wasn't What I Meant At All

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nothing is going to plan, but everything is coming to a resolution... of sorts, I guess. Hey, at least a certain someone isn't missing anymore.

The first condition, she has to help him meet. She has pretty good control in that area anyway. Biorhythms, feedback. She can generate a response from that part of her body without lifting a finger. But he doesn't know that, and his touch is helping to speed things up... once she gives him enough subtle guidance as to where and how to use it. 

“Ah, ah, ah!” she sighs/gasps/cries with calculated passion, biting her lip as if trying to resist what is actually a quite measured response to moderately intense sensation. Her smile is genuine though. Because even in paying her price, he is putting himself in her debt. He is 'winning' by being of service to her as much as he will be winning again in a moment when she serves him, and so he will owe her two capitulations. That and a male lover's loyalty, which isn't much, but is more than nothing. 

“Oh God!” Ethan groaned, breathing in the wet wonderful smell of her. He was using both hands: two fingers on his right, deep inside, caressing, exploring; the whole mitt of his left, pressing down to where the thumb was vigorously rubbing the sweetest of all sweet spots. 

The way he was touching her, the way she had silently insisted on being touched was more than most women would allow in his experience, too direct, too aggressive, too relentless in applying pressure to that most sensitive little organ. But this was what she wanted. 

Her clit poked up fat and red and hard under the constant rubbing and pressing of his thumb. Her hips bucked and twisted and writhed and rubbed her cunt against his other hand as it tried to draw him deeper into itself. Hard as she was trying not too, unwilling yet to admit that his touch had so much effect on her, biting her lip in a vain effort to reign herself in, Bridget gasped her helpless, involuntary gasps of pleasure.

Ethan wanted desperately to thrust his face between her thighs, not only for the unspeakable joy of tasting her in such a state of intoxicating arousal, but because he desperately wanted at least one of his hands back. His cock was straining to be free of the much too tight pants that he had borrowed, begging to be touched and stroked and rubbed against her. But none of that was allowed. This was the first condition. This act was for her pleasure alone. 

Considering how secretly pleased he was with the other 'conditions' she had set as 'payment', considering how much he couldn't help enjoying even this act of self torment, he could hardly say it was too much to ask for the pleasure of finally mounting her, never mind the much more important benefits that he'd be getting by meeting her other two conditions. And well... there were worse things for a man's ego than getting a beautiful woman off.

This has gone on long enough to be convincing, long enough for the fool to feel confident in taking the credit. Nothing is served by delaying any longer. Finding her moment, The Lady lets go. She isn't faking it or even forcing it, just letting it happen, a controlled surrender of control. 

Her body shudders and spasms and tightens around his gropy, greedy little fingers. Her back arches and for a moment her whole being is stiff as rigor mortis. She utters not that delicate, Ah...Ah...Ah... that clients like to hear but a low almost guttural moan of complaint, “Oh, Great Gods!” It's the same thing she groans face-down into a toilet when she's had much too much to drink, and in the same inflection, as pleasure washes in and over her, bringing not joy but disgust, resignation, and relief. Now that's done and she is glad it's over. 

The man, 'Ethan', collapses with his drooling face against her thigh, sweaty and weak as if exhausted by the ten minutes effort she has made him put in. Disgusting pig. He laps at the thin fluid that he is no doubt congratulating himself for bringing forth. 

Lapping turns to nuzzling and nuzzling back to licking and kissing and sucking. She's mildly annoyed by his slobbering over her already overstimulated genitals, but for the most part she couldn't care less. It's a waste of time is all, delaying getting to the thing he's partly paid for that needs to be gotten over with to get to the part where he keeps paying. 

“Ah... ah... ah...” She strategically fakes a second climax, convincingly enough for most people but just shy of what she expects would convince him, just close enough that he can't call her on it. This is one round she isn't letting him win. 

Ethan felt a stab of disappointment. He knew damn well she wasn't coming again. She was calling time on the round was what she was doing, spoiling his fun. Well, but... 'let's pretend' was a game two could play at. “Mmmm, I think you owe me a little something extra for that,” Ethan purred, sliding up to lay beside her, embracing her, as she pretended to steady herself after her latest 'orgasm'. 

“You owe _me_ , you sack of month-old, uncleaned bull intestines!” she reminded him sharply. “One transfer from the brig to the helm of this tub and one assist from you and your 'mates' in pulling the Lassiter job.” 

Ethan suppressed a smile at the colorful take on swearing that this culture had as well as the unthinking politeness of translating for him when she really didn't give a shit for him at all, a courtesy that must be second nature in such a multilingual world. He could have laughed out loud at her insistence that he help her do things she could have infinitely more easily managed without his help than the other way round, but it would have done him no good to show her his amusement and risk pissing her off even more, so he didn't. 

“You can't change the price or what you get by... throwing in a free spit job,” she all but snarled. “You get exactly one good grapple, so get on with it before I decide that slobberfest counts.”

“By all means,” Ethan said, coolly expansive, making as if to rise. “We'll call what's happened between us an even exchange (one act of your choosing and one of mine) and I'll go on about my merry way, shall I?”

“Motherless-son-of-a-ferret!” Bridget all but sighed in frustration, surprising Ethan a millisecond later by grasping his erect penis through his pants and pulling him back towards her, “That's nothing but a liar's bluff! You'd sooner die than leave here without fucking me and you know it.”

“Please,” Ethan sneered, firmly removing her hand and waving her back as he got to his feet. “I'm just as good to wank about it, thanks all the same. Bit safer too, I imagine, from an... erm epidemiological standpoint if nothing else. So If you'll just excuse me...”

That did it, the woman cursed long and loud in Chinese and maybe a few other languages, all courtesy forgotten, ending in, “Fuck me, you son-of-a-bitch, and then damn well do what you've promised before I bite your nut-sac off like a jealous squirrel!” 

With that, she slammed Ethan's utterly unresisting body onto the tiny mattress, straddled him, kissed him so hard that both of their mouths were liable to be bruised, and began efficiently removing his pants at the same time. With a low noise between a groan and a growl in which surrender mingled indistinguishably with triumph, Ethan kissed her back just as forcefully, just as hungrily. 

Her body relaxed and she smiled with friendly mockery as he rolled, pinning her beneath him and plunged his cock into her tight, wet cunt. Bridget wrapped her legs around Ethan's shanks and rolled her hips to meet his every thrust. 

They fucked hard and fast for a few moments, like eager, adolescent primates. Then they slowed into a more sustainable rhythm of long, slow, deep, even strokes. Every time he got close to orgasm, Ethan would change his pattern or stop for a few seconds, ever delaying the moment. 

The Lady is more pleased than annoyed by the long slow, meandering path the mark is taking to get to his little brass ring. She is in her element. She lets him take his time, take his pleasure. She lets him, and there is no doubt who is indebted to whom. 

When at last he mewls and squirts and collapses on top of her, she has never felt more proud, more satisfied. “Alright,” she smiles, “I thought about it. Fair's fair. When we get paid for the Lassiter... I'll give you a hell of a send off. We square?” 

Still shuddering and gasping, Ethan nods jerkily. The Lady embraces him, fondles him almost lovingly, without even really minding that he is lying there long minutes in her arms sweating on her for no real purpose. At last, he is hers. Whether the prize is worth having remains to be seen, but for now all that matters is that once again, she's won.

*****

“Ah Ha!” Willow shouted in sudden, startled triumph. Amy lifted her head from the books spread before her at the other end of Giles' kitchen table. “Well... not so much 'Ah Ha' as 'Oh, that's what I did wrong,'” Willow admitted sheepishly, realizing that she didn't have much to feel triumphant about, “But at least it's a start toward figuring out how to undo it.”

“So,” Amy prompted, “Why did the spell fail?”

Willow made a sort of a pained face. “That's the thing,” she explained. “As far as I can tell, it didn't. We sped Buffy up to exactly the same speed as the rest universe... but we sped the rest of Sunnydale up even faster.”

“What?” Amy asked stunned, “Why? I mean, howcome it would do that?” 

“I don't know... exactly,” Willow admitted, “but according to what it says here about distribution of energy flows and the influence of... additional motives... I think my wishing that all the... that everyone would come back, sort of threw the spell out of whack and caused this huge side effect. Except...” Willow's brow furrowed, “from what I understand, there shouldn't have been side effects this big unless the contrary wish was at least partly manifested, unless some of the men did come back.”

“That's true,” Amy admitted. Then after a second's thought she added, “maybe some of them did come back, just not in Sunnydale. Maybe they're frozen too... relatively speaking... and so we just haven't heard about them yet.”

“Maybe,” Willow mumbled, extremely doubtfully. As much as she had tried not to express it, as shocked as she had been to feel it bursting from her mouth, Willow's wish had been extremely clear and focused. She had wished for _her_ men back: Oz, Giles, Xander; most of all her father. Having enough random guys show up somewhere else on the planet to cause such a large magical distortion around Sunnydale didn't seem like a logical outcome of that. 

Still, if there was one thing Willow had learned about magic in the short time she'd been practicing, it was that magic was unpredictable. But if she'd learned two things, the second was that when you looked close enough at any magical effect to make the connections to its causes, to see the pattern, it always made a kind of sense, no matter how unexpected. There were always connections, always a pattern. Magic was like math in that way. It just took some figuring out. 

But now was not a time for figuring. There was a knock at the door. The kind that wouldn't be ignored.

*****

“Could you... wait... just a moment?” Giles called out when the knocking persisted. He hoped the muffling of the metal door would sufficiently obscure the catch in his voice, but he really doubted it. Startled at an already discomfited moment, it took him several minutes to coordinate the physical necessities of drying his eyes, cleaning the semen off of his thighs, getting his pants back on and opening the door. Getting into a half decent emotional state was too much to be attempted. 

He didn't know why he should be quite so ashamed and unsettled to find that the man knocking on his door (looking every bit as miserable and confused as he felt) had also clearly been crying. But he was. 

“H—M—Hank?” Rupert Giles addressed him uncertainly. Hank tried not to be annoyed... then tried not to be sick with rage and grief instead as the thought that he wouldn't be terribly comfortable to see a certain Mr. Lovell of Memphis show up at his doorstep melted into the fresh realization that Los Angeles and Memphis were dust and ash, if that. 

He felt lost. The man before him seemed at once a total stranger and the last living soul who might be close enough to touch. He was barefoot, wearing rumpled tweed pants and a no-longer-clean white T-shirt; disheveled, stubbly, tattooed. Nothing like the librarian he had seemed. 

“Come in,” he managed at last, sounding almost as shaken as Hank felt. He must have been exhausted as well. They had only parted about four hours earlier. 

“I couldn't sleep,” Hank found himself apologizing as as he collapsed onto the bare mattress opposite the other man's very much unmade bank. They both sat quietly for a moment. “The others don't give a shit,” Hank said at last, bitter and deadly serious, certain at least of that. “We have to fix this. We have to find a way somehow. The two of us.”

“I agree,” Giles admitted. “I... wasn't getting much rest myself,” he added in belated response to Hank's recent apology as his fuzzy 'morning' brain fumbled towards a remembrance of basic courtesy. “What are your thoughts?”

“This... thing... about Buffy...” Hank began, then, feeling the air thicken with tension, he clarified, “the... 'Slayer'... thing.” Giles didn't seem at all relieved. “She tried to tell me but... I'm still trying to understand. You guys, you...Watchers? I mean, you deal with supernatural stuff a lot, right?”

Giles rubbed his temples, still wishing to be more clear headed, more sure of things. “We... research occult phenomena,” he seemed to apologize. “The Slayer usually does most of the actual dealing with. But I... I could tell you a lot of theoretical information about... alternate dimensions and mystical convergences, but...” he shook his head forlornly. “I know sod-all about time travel... of any sort that's not manifestly impossible, at any rate. 

"I'd come closer to approaching it magically than scientifically, which is probably how it was done in our case anyhow, but all my experience and training tells me that there's no undoing powerful magic without being able to confront the party responsible for it. I'm... not saying we won't find a way,” he added hurriedly. “I can't... I won't believe that. But it may take years to make any headway. We're starting completely from scratch... except without any... erm... 'scratch'.” 

“Well...” Hank mused, “Like you were saying before... Job One has to be to find a stable place to work from. Someplace where we will have access to... whatever stores of information these people have. But from the way everyone freaked out about... the government or whoever catching up to them... and the way they are clearly scrabbling for money just to say alive... we might have kind of a dystopian frontier situation going on here, a bad combination of too much government and not enough civilization. Somehow, I don't think they are going to have open communal dining halls, attractive public housing and vast elegant libraries that happily cater to undocumented strangers.”

“That's... my impression also,” Giles admitted grimly.

“Hell,” Hank said, “It's not like we're exactly safe where we are either. Much as we seem to have lucked into a ride on the friendliest pirate ship in the history of the universe, they're going to get tired of us soon if we can't think of a way to be useful. Never mind they still have the problem of not knowing whether we'll somehow turn the authorities on to them if they pitch us out anywhere accessible to civilization. Which is another problem that is going to turn out to be our problem pretty quick. I don't think all of them are as... scrupulous as this Captain Reynolds seems to be.”

“Yes,” Giles agreed, “We certainly need to be very—” 

The door slid open to reveal two armed crew members, the First Mate 'Zoe' and that big thug everyone called 'Jane'. Their weapons were still strapped to their hips, but their hands were resting on them. Hank had the very uneasy feeling that their problems had just gotten a lot less theoretical. 

*****

“Oh my God! Mom!” Willow gasped when she finally found her tongue. “C-come...” Willow paused, yeah, it was daytime. The sun was shining. “Come in,” she concluded haltingly. 

“A few people said I might find you here,” Sheila replied hostilely. “What was he, a Wizard?” she demanded, “Is he the one who taught you to mettle with this... these forces?”

Willow could barely focus on what her mother was saying, never mind decipher what she meant. She was still trying to process the fact of her awakening. “Mom! Thank God you're—” alive she almost said. 'Awake' she was going to say instead and was trying hard to mean it, but it was difficult to mean that when Sheila was looking at her the way she was at that moment, so hateful, so accusing. 

“Don't you dare!” Sheila cut her off, moving forward, through the doorway, forcing Willow to move back. “Don't drag God into your lies, you filthy, blasphemous, disciple of Satan!” Willow blinked and stammered, unable to organize a response. 

Instinctively, Amy circled behind the couch in case she needed cover and started running through spells in her head, trying to think of something that would help. If push came to shove, she could always turn Sheila into a rat. But no one was quite pushing and shoving yet, and getting too aggressive could easily make things a whole lot worse. After all, having hostile magic done on her pretty much had to be what Sheila was pissed about, as anyone would be. 

And boy, was she ever pissed! Amy had never seen her anything like this. If she hadn't been seeing it now, she probably wouldn't have believed it. Sheila could be self-righteous, sure, but it was always in that whiny, disdainful, I'm-disappointed-in-the-foolish-inferior-world sort of way. And it had always been in a more _educated_ than thou sort of way too. 

Amy had never heard her spout off about God and demons and blasphemy the way she was now. Although she had to admit, she had never heard her say anything _against_ religion, and Ira had used to spout off about it all the time. Still, Amy was confident that if anyone else had ever dared to say the things to her daughter that she was shouting at her now ('purity', defilement, Commandments, etc.); Sheila would have blasted them as the knuckle dragging minions of Patriarchy. 

Willow was doing more than stammering now, getting pissed herself, shouting back. She was defiant, defensive. The term 'Patriarchy' was in deed being hurtled accusingly in her mother's direction along with a couple of other two-dollar words that Amy barely recognized. Then, in mid feminist invective, Willow suddenly stopped and changed direction. “Wait just a damned minute!” She demanded, “How did you even know that I did anything to you? You always told me there was no such thing as magic!”

What Amy did next had been meant to help, to break through Sheila's angry insistence that how she knew what she knew didn't matter. It was a simple truth spell, one which Amy maintained, like the rat spell, ready to use at a moment's notice. However, she used it more sparingly even than the rat spell because it was harder to set back up again. And because she was always selective about calling on any gods besides Hecate. 

It should have worked easily on an untrained non-adept like Sheila was supposed to be. She shouldn't have even been aware of it. She should have felt that this impulse (to say exactly everything she honestly thought and felt) had just welled up from within her own soul. Instead, Sheila started, suddenly alert, glaring hostilely in Amy's direction. 

What was more, she actually resisted. The spell skidded and bumped up against her aura and... something between 'shattered' and 'exploded'. It rained down upon the three of them like an invisible dusting of particulate matter. 

“Frustration!” Amy swore, or tried to. “Unrighteous enveloping suckitude! Now we'll all be telling each other the truth about everything!”

~~~~~

“Oh, Cordelia!” Harmony wailed, cutting her friend off in mid-expalantion, mid-confession. They were sitting up on the side of Cordelia's bed, the one with the trundle tucked underneath, chosen specifically to facilitate their mutual sleeping over, just as the two twin beds in Harmony’s room were. Squealing with something shockingly like joy, Harmony threw her arms around Cordelia. “I can't believe you'd do that for me!”

“But I...” Cordelia didn't know what to say. Harmony's response was insane, she thought. No one could possibly think that the literal disappearance of ever man worth calling that (even along with most of the ones who weren't) was a good thing. And yet her gratitude was so genuine, so warm and trusting and pitiful. 

She was hurt too badly to see anything but her own suffering, Cordelia realized. That and the solid, enveloping, cling-toable comfort of the one devoted friend who had saved her, had placed her above all the world. Crazy as it was, it was a comfort Harmony desperately needed, and at that moment, Cordelia couldn't take it from her. 

“...I overdid it,” Cordelia concluded, sliding from her honest confession into an Oscar worthy facsimile. “It was only supposed to get rid of Snyder and... a few others. Just—all the men who'd ever hurt us.”

“Well... that's okay,” Harmony tried to reassure her. “I mean, you said it didn't get rid of Devon and guys like that, right? Or little boys.”

“That's true,” Cordelia conceded apprehensively.

“So it's probably just every guy who ever raped, or betrayed or cheated on anyone. You got it exactly right. You can't help it if almost all the men in the world are worthless scumbags.” 

“Were,” Cordelia mumbled numbly, with a feeling of deep defeat. She felt like that guy in that book, American Psycho, a book she had read because her father told her not to and which she could therefore never admit that she had hated, that it terrified her and made her skin crawl and not just because of the squishy parts. 

Here she was trying to confess to destroying half the world, to killing billions of men and millions of women. But Harmony didn't want to hear that in what she was saying. She had an idea of a best friend, of a heroine undertaking a righteous vendetta, and she expect Cordelia to fulfill it. She wouldn't see what was not even hiding right under the surface of that, what a disaster this half murdered world was. 

Harmony was selectively blind, seeing only what fit what she already knew, already wanted to know. The way Cordelia had been most of her life. 

Cordelia smiled and tried to be cheerful, to respond to Harmony in a way that was appropriately comforting. Her performance remained Oscar worthy if she did say so herself. 

No good could come of her confessions being believed and understood for what they were, she told herself. She was just lucky that Harmony had taken it the way she had and was grateful enough to keep a secret. Maybe some things were just too horrible to look too deeply under the surface of. 

This was the real world now. This was the world she had to live in. What good did it do to think that it was terrible or that it was her fault? 

“Hey!” Cordelia said brightly, “I hear April Fools opened back up this morning. We should definitely go shopping!”

~~~~~

The sign was ridiculously festive. But at least it was clear. “Welcome to Sunnydale,” Joyce mumbled aloud. She repeated the name, “Sunnydale,” trying to make it mean something to her. Suddenly, horribly, it did. 

It was like another little luggage tag, only this time, when she pulled on it, she found that there was a whole suitcase full of memories attached. “Oh Dear Lord!” she gasped as the horrors of her life came rushing back to her, including connections and realizations she had never consciously made before now. 

No wonder she had worked so hard at denying and repressing the facts of her life. Part of her wished she could do it again, right now. But she could not afford to deny who she was any longer. She had to find her daughter Buffy, the vampire slayer. 

Joyce heard a car approaching from the desert behind her, headed towards town. She stuck out her thumb, feeling ridiculous, but seeing no better option. After walking through the desert for God only knew how long, she was too exhausted and parched to be cautious about taking rides from strangers. 

At least this time the vehicle didn't try to run her down. “Where are you headed?” the lady truck driver asked her. 

“Revello Drive,” Joyce said.

“You're kidding me!” the woman exclaimed. “Why would anyone want to stay in Sunnydale?” 

Joyce sighed. “Family reasons,” she explained, thinking it best not to go into too much detail. On either count.

*****

“Shhhhhh!” Oz hissed impatiently, warningly. 

“Sorry,” Xander whispered, still not quietly enough for Oz's taste. “It's just... I heard something... I mean I think... did you—” Oz nodded, putting his finger to his lips and looking stern. 

Xander quieted. But the sound of someone very definitely stopping on the landing outside the apartment where they now hid— _right_ outside, more than one someone, chatting and laughing and sounding like large young men—made it difficult to stay quiet. The sound of something scrabbling at the door made it impossible. 

“Intruders!” Xander whispered frantically. Oz glared at him. Xander shrugged and looked sheepish. Then it hit him like a fist in the stomach. “We have to get _out_ of here!” he hissed. There was no 911 when you were the intruders. There was only getting caught or hurting people. People minding there own business. People who lived here. 

Of course they had to get out of here. Only an idiot would think that needed saying. Oz was just about at his wits end with the idiot fate (or whoever) had saddled him with as a companion. He'd have liked very much to have been able to give his full attention to the problem of getting out of here, if only Xander would shut up. As it was, almost his full attention was focused on the very important work of controlling his temper. 

At last there was a moment of relative quiet (not counting that sort of very important key-turning-in-a-lock sound) and Oz was able to devote some portion of his mind to actual strategic thinking. There was a window, which would lead them out onto the roof. It was not exactly a long-term solution, but it was a fast one, and that's what they needed right now. 

At least it was still dark outside. And they had clean clothes on that presumably met local fashion customs, though in Oz's case they were clearly much too big, involving a lot of cinching and rolling up. 

Underneath his much-closer-to-fitting clothes, Xander's wounds had been rinsed with clean water and rebandaged with torn bedsheets, though they didn't smell much better. He was still weak and feverish, in piss poor condition for climbing around on roofs, but what other choice was there? Without a word, Oz began pulling him in the direction of the window. 

Oz tried to steady Xander on his feet, tried to help him over the windowsill. But Xander was swaying, obviously dizzy. Even an idiot could see that he was in danger of falling, and it was a long way down. The idiot in question panicked. He clung to the window frame instinctively and would not be pushed through. 

It was too late. The door opened. There were men there, shouting. A truly serious sounding alarm began to wail. There were more people outside, more shouting. They were gathering. 

Panic wasn't the word for it anymore. Oz felt a nauseous wave of dread and regret. There was nothing he could do. The threshold he was crossing had no frame to hang onto. 

As the shouting turned to screaming, Xander managed to get himself turned around from the window in time to see Oz finish transforming, torn clothes falling from his bulky, muscular, fur-clad physique. One of the newcomers fled, but the other grabbed a long slender not-usually-a-weapon-but-it-could-be looking something, maybe a floor lamp, and charged Oz. 

“No! Don't!” Xander shouted warningly, not really sure who he meant to warn. The wolf growled in rage and threw himself forward, colliding with the man, knocking the man from his feet. The man was pinned beneath the snapping snarling wolf, holding it at bay with his... whatever it was, barely keeping it from ripping his throat out. 

Xander looked into the strangers eyes. Those eyes were terrified, desperate, begging for help. Without letting himself think about it too much, Xander leapt onto Oz's back and tried to wrestle him off the stranger. 

Agony! Sharp. Sudden. He had gotten his hand too close to Oz's face. Solid jaws clamped shut like a steal trap. For a moment, he thought his hand would be ripped off. Then came the sudden relief of teeth letting go. 

More men from outside had rushed inside to challenge Oz. Distracted, the werewolf let go of Xander's hand and violently shrugged him off, slinging him against a wall or furniture or something. Xander never completely lost consciousness, but he was weak and disoriented. The room swam. His hand was bleeding badly. He had to get something to stop the bleeding. That was all he could think about. 

Xander tried to pull himself up against whatever he had been knocked into. His knees buckled and he landed in a heap on the floor. He was aware that there was a fight still going on around him or at least in the same room with him, a really serious fight. 

People were being killed. There was blood everywhere. He had to do something; but what could he do? The monster was too strong, and he was too weak. Besides, the monster was Oz. The monster was his friend. 

Suddenly, Xander's hand began to itch, and then to ache and then to burn. The pain was excruciating. And it was spreading. It radiated up Xander's arm and spread through his whole body. He cried out in torment. His body felt as though it were being ripped apart, there was a ripping sound even. 

By the time Xander half registered that that was the sound of clothing being torn from his body, he was awash in a sea of overwhelming sensation. The hot-savory smell of blood caught his attention making it hard to notice much else. He growled eagerly and leapt into the fray. 

Sound and motion swirled around him. Instinctive action was rewarded again and again with the satisfying crack of bones and the wet, delicious rending of flesh. By the time the world slowed down enough to start to make a little sense again, Xander was standing next to Oz. They were both naked, panting, and covered in blood. 

There were bodies and body parts everywhere. The tiny apartment looked like the scene of a massacre. Which was what it was. 

Xander's eyes landed on the eyes of the guy who probably lived there, the guy he had tried to help. They were blank, lifeless, staring from his bloodied face into eternity. 

“Come _on_!” Oz snapped impatiently, obviously not for the first time and began dragging him once again towards the window. “There'll be more coming.” 

This time the roof didn't seem so dangerous. Fingers and toes gripped and held instinctively to every tiny groove and bump that presented itself, as two pale shapes made there way through the moonless night over the rooftops of the city.

*****

“Oh my God! How could you do that?” Willow shouted at Amy. “Why would you lie to me about something this important?” Five minutes ago, they had been two against Sheila, but as soon as all the honestly started, Amy had become the odd woman out. 

“I knew I should have just turned you into a rat,” she said to Sheila, but she couldn't help but follow that up with an answer to Willow's direct question, which was, “Because if I told you the truth you would have used a condom or something and then I'd have had almost no chance of getting pregnant! I mean, how else was I supposed to keep you obligated to me after Oz and Xander come back! It's bad enough having to watch you make moon eyes at Buffy!”

“We can't let her do this,” Sheila admonished Willow harshly, while her head was still spinning from trying to absorb what Amy had just said. “The child of our blood, our power, born to the servant of Hecate! It would _be_ the thing that people _said_ we were!” 

Willow didn't have time to ask her mother what that meant. “Tardis!” Amy shouted, hurtling her intention in Sheila's direction. Instinctively, defensively, Willow's mother, threw up her hands and her will between them. As before the intended magic bounced and burst. 

“Son-of-a-bitch!” Buffy cursed as she fell from the couch and rolled onto the floor. “What the hell is going on?” A tenth of a second to absorb the mood of the room told her the answer. Nothing good. 

~~~~~

“Oh God No!” Spike sobbed. “Come on baby,” he urged, through his tears, trying to pull Drusilla into a standing position. “Come on baby, get up. I didn't mean it.” The arm he was tugging at came lose and fell to the floor next the the rest of her pale, still, piecemeal body. 

She was not dead. Well... no deader than usual. Her neck had not been severed. It still held her head firmly to a torso that was still attached to most of one leg. 

All he had to do was to gather up the pieces, Spike told himself. All he had to do was to sew them back on and get some blood in her. Then she'd be... well, not good as new, of course not. But she'd be good enough to hold out until they could do that damned healing ritual. 

Spike kicked the bloody pick ax aside and got to work. Carefully, lovingly, he gathered up all of the bits he had hacked from his sire, his lover. He put them in a drawstring trash bag, which was all he could find, and hung it around her neck, not wanting the parts to have a chance of getting separated from the body. 

Gathering her thus into his arms, he made for the basement and the tunnels below. He would have gone back for his little truck of virgins, but by the time they had made it to the safety of the dark stairwell, the sky outside the school had suddenly burst into broad daylight. 

~~~~~

If Buffy had ever shared a more awkward silence with anyone, she didn't know when. She and Amy sat alone in Giles' kitchen, drinking tea. Willow and her mother were upstairs, discussing there past present and future. A discussion which Amy apparently had every reason to wish she were in on and some justification for thinking she should be but which she might actually be safer far, far away from. 

“Maybe you should go,” Buffy said finally. 

Amy shrugged. “They'll find me if they're looking for me,” she said. “I'd rather get things straight with them from the beginning. Besides,” she added with a wan smile, “if we do this with you here, I'm at least pretty sure they won't kill me.”

Buffy opened her mouth to protest before she remembered that Amy was under a truth spell. If that was how she really felt, there was probably no reassuring her that Willow would never do that. “Well I _am_ here,” she said instead. It was meant as comfort, but as soon as the words left her lips, Buffy had the sickening realization that she had just committed herself to protect Amy from Willow. Amy and possibly her possible baby, whom some people were apparently expecting to grow up powerful and evil. 

“God, I'm an idiot,” Amy murmured bleakly. “I didn't know, you know. Neither of us did, who Willow's family were, where they came from. We just wanted to use magic to make things easier, to have a little fun. I should have known better than to trust anyone connected to my mother.”

Buffy was puzzled. “Who are you talking about?” she asked.

Amy laughed. “Of course it's not obvious to you,” Amy groused. “You pride yourself on not paying attention to the other plains, even when they're all around you. Slay first and ask question never(!) 

"Hecate,” Amy clarified, when Buffy continued to look puzzled. “She set this whole thing up, me and Willow. She has some kind of plan, I just don't know what it is yet. I don't know whether it involves me being alive or not even. It scares the hell out of me. 

"She's a scary goddess if you really get to know Her at all. And possessive. You don't go back to some other god after Hecate. Even calling on anyone else is... complicated. You especially don't get involved with You Know Who. He's Her worst enemy, has been for thousands of years. And He's nobody you want to cross either. I'm so, so fucked here!”

Amy looked up. Buffy was still looking at her like she was babbling nonsense. “She belongs to Him,” Amy tried again to explain, “not just in a 'hey I've been Bat Mitzvahed' kind of way. They all do. The Levines. They're something special. 

"Most gods call them Acolytes. Hecate calls Hers Witches, the kind I'm really, really not. He calls them Prophets. Sheila isn't one, just part of the Line, but Willow really might be. Magic comes so easy for her... I should have known.” 

Buffy didn't have time to decide whether Amy was nuts or whether there was actually something much more monumentally fucked up going on like Amy obviously thought. Her distress was certainly real, and there was literally no way she could be intentionally lying, so it had to be one or the other. 

But now the doorbell was ringing, repeatedly, frantically. Buffy excused herself and opened the door. She could hardly believe her eyes. She grabbed her mother and hugged her. 

Joyce was babbling an explanation of how the people encamped at her house had suggested looking for her here, but Buffy paid it very little attention. Her attention was suddenly drawn very sharply to something else. “You're pregnant!” Buffy exclaimed. “Really, really pregnant. Mom, how is that possible? You've only been gone two weeks!” 

“No,” Joyce shook her head, sounding worried. “That's not right. I've been gone... I don't know. Seven or eight months at least. I was stuck in a demon dimension.”

“Well, that explains it,” Amy informed them. She had followed Buffy into the living room, not wanting to be alone with her misery. “Time can move all kinds of different ways in a demon dimension.”

“That doesn't explain half of it!” Buffy objected. “Mom, you're _pregnant_. How did this happen?” 

Joyce gave her a tired, annoyed and yet somehow embarrassed look. “Okay, I know how, but...” the next question caught in Buffy's throat. She was suddenly not at all sure she wanted to open the door to the whole who got who pregnant conversation right now.

“Buffy's afraid to ask you who because she's pregnant by Giles and I might be pregnant by Willow,” Amy supplied helpfully. “Sorry,” She added sheepishly, “got caught in my own truth spell.” 

Joyce opened her mouth to express indignation or something along those lines at the idea of Buffy having sex with a man clearly several years older than her mother. Almost instantly, she thought better of it. But even if she hadn't, she would have been helpless to speak in the face of the claim this Amy girl had just made. Without another word of protest, she let the girls lead her into the kitchen for a cup of tea. 

Within a very few short minutes, Amy (who seemed incapable of actually shutting up for long) had figured out and shared with both of them her explanation of what had happened. “Oh my god!” she gasped, going suddenly pale, deeply terrified. When she explained, Buffy felt she had a right to be terrified. 

“It was _my_ wish, not Willow's that screwed up the spell. This means _my_ mom is probably on the loose somewhere right now!” Wow, Buffy thought, talk about, 'be careful what you wish for.' There were some people, she thought, who should really just stay missing. 

~~~~~

Eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. Ira watched as the last candle flickered out. He couldn't hold his breath any longer. It rattled out of him in one long, ragged sigh as he gave up the ghost and died.

**Author's Note:**

> The Sunnydale part of this story takes place during the time period of and immediately after BtVS 2.19 "I Only Have Eyes for You." but incorporates the premise, or at least the frame premise, of BtVS 3.9 "The Wish". It has only a slight relationship to any of the events of Lady's Choice and is a serious departure for this series in that respect. The Firefly part takes place during Firefly 1.11 "Trash".

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [In Firefly Order](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1706807) by [MyEvilTwin (ProtoNeoRomantic)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProtoNeoRomantic/pseuds/MyEvilTwin)
  * [Black Market](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1717646) by [MyEvilTwin (ProtoNeoRomantic)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProtoNeoRomantic/pseuds/MyEvilTwin)




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